Even at the tortoise-like pace of German humour, this particular punchline has been a long time in the making: 43 years after it was blocked by communist censors, one of the funniest films shot in East Germany has finally seen the light of day.

Hands up or I Shoot, a comedy that quietly mocked the East German police state, was given its premiere in Dresden on Wednesday night and went on general release yesterday.

It will probably not make the Germans roll in the aisles, and parts of it will be incomprehensible to youngsters who were born after communism collapsed. But it establishes a valuable principle: that the East Germans really did try to laugh at their rulers.

“I don’t know if this is going to be a hit,” Angelika Mihan, a respected critic for the Märkische Allgemeine, said. “But it is really witty in parts and it shows just how bone-headed the regime was to ban it.”

Directed by Hans-Joachim Kasprzik, the film plays on the ideological creed that crime — a permanent feature of capitalism — was only a transitory phenomenon under socialism. When true communism arrived, crime would become extinct.

The hero, Holms, played by Rolf Herricht, is a cop in a village without crime, a sign surely that East Germany was getting ever closer to communist paradise. How could the censor even raise his eyebrow let alone his red pen? Holms is ambitious and frustrated; he craves a car chase, a successful case, an opponent worthy of the name. So he engages some layabouts to steal the monument from the main square of his village. He goes in hot pursuit and on the way falls in love.

All harmless stuff, one might think. Nothing doing. The Central Committee of the Communist Party insisted on changes in the dialogue. And in the editing. And in the voice of the narrator. Even this hatchet work was not good enough: the film was banned in 1966 and has not been seen since.

The censors were probably right to be afraid. Over the border in Poland a few years earlier, the playwright Slawomir Mrozek slipped a play, Police, past the censors and the Russians were unhappy.

The play centred on a policeman interrogating a political prisoner and satirised the need for a police state to create its own enemies — to stave off redundancy and justify its steadily expanding powers (in the end the prisoner arrests the policeman).

The East Germans were determined not to repeat this mistake. “The film presents the work of the security organs in the wrong light and militates against the goal of stamping out criminality,” the censorship office said, just before the film tapes were banished to a steel safe. They languished there for 34 years before the film company Defa recovered them.

Hands up could have been Kasprzik’s masterpiece if the East German regime had not seen humour as subversive. He died in 1997. The Stasi secret police had 100,000 full-time staff and another 100,000 informers; it was a society that was constantly trying to truffle out disloyalty. And what could be more sinister than a joke? The regime decided to stockade its humourists, allowing a carefully monitored cabaret theatre and a satirical magazine, Eulenspiegel, which at its peak had a circulation of half a million (in a population of barely 17 million).

There, jokes about consumer shortages were allowed occasional outings. The only funny features were the writings of Johannes Conrad, dubbed the “Communist Woody Allen” for his dry, worldweary musings. One priest, Theo Lehmann, who attempted to liven up his sermons with oblique jokes about the regime, became the target of a whole Stasi unit that took notes during the services.

It was a similar story across the Soviet bloc. The Slovak Jan Kalina was jailed after publishing a sellout 1001 Jokes in 1969, but the East Germans made humour control into a peculiarly leaden process. “We really enjoyed making this film,” the actor Herbert Köler, 88, said yesterday. “We just could not believe that the regime would be so lacking in humour as to ban it.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• Alicia Keys lets rip
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes