Even if Max Bialystock hadn’t gone to prison for embezzling from the backers of his hit Broadway show, trouble would have found him one way or another. Didn’t he slap his business partner, the accountant Leo Bloom, after dousing the poor man with a glass of water during working hours? And while Max’s hanky-panky with Ulla, the receptionist, may have involved consenting adults, his whole business model was based on trading sexual favors with senior citizens for money. If ever a man in show business was in need of cancellation, it was surely Max Bialystock.

Not a chance! Max is a beloved figure who has, for more than 50 years, inspired not outrage but delight. The man is an institution, an archetype. He turned a song-and-dance spectacle about Hitler into a Broadway smash. Hitler! Max’s exploits have been chronicled in a 2005 movie and a long-running stage musical, both called “The Producers” and both starring Nathan Lane. Long before that, Max was played by Zero Mostel, in the first film directed by Mel Brooks. That original “Producers,” released in 1967 with a very young Gene Wilder as Leo, was a staple of my youth.

Now that fascism seems to be in bloom once again, it is a good time to revisit “Springtime for Hitler,” the show that made Bialystock and Brooks into household names. But like Leo when he first shuffles into Max’s office to audit the books, I’m a little nervous at the prospect.

The question of how much and what kind of fun it’s permissible to have with Nazis never goes away, and the resurgence of right-wing extremism around the world makes the question newly uncomfortable. When “Jojo Rabbit” showed up at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the fact that it played Hitler at least partly for laughs — with the director, Taika Waititi impersonating a goofy, gangly, almost lovable Führer — you could hear the wincing from across the border. The relative innocuousness of the film (which won the audience award at the festival) doesn’t entirely dispel the uneasiness around it .