Miloš Forman got the Czechoslovakian government angry with The Firemen’s Ball because firemen are authority figures and you don't make fun of Authority behind the Iron Curtain, apparently. Even if the film is based on a small town ball Forman and his crew attended during a previous production. Everything happens in one night. Old firemen are shown to be terrible event planners (the impromptu beauty pageant is particularly humorous), and not great at firefighting either, but it's the Committee structure that suffers a glancing blow, and thus the Communist regime in toto. There are certainly political allusions in the film, like the raffle prizes getting stolen (and especially the State's - I mean the fire brigade's - reaction to it) and how an old man who's lost everything is treated, but generally, it can all be taken as simple observational humor. Observations that happen to ridicule the wrong people. Or used it. Let's just be glad the film survived to reach our eyes and ears once the curtain lifted. It's very amusing.

"Milos Forman's "The Firemen's Ball" was banned "permanently and forever" by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1968, as Soviet troops marched in to suppress a popular uprising. It was said to be a veiled attack on the Soviet system and its bureaucracy". (Roger Ebert's review)

A great satire. :)

During the height of the Cold War, many, especially in the west, had numerous fears and questions about the red regime. What if they drop the bomb? What if they invade? What if they infiltrate our government? “The Firemen’s Ball” asks a question that was hitherto ignored by mainstream discourse:

What if the communists were morons?