It’s all in how you present it, and how it’s acted.
When ANY play that’s more than a few centuries old is performed, there’s a danger that the audience won’t understand it, or even that the ACTORS don’t really get it. I’ve sat through productions of Shakespeare comedies in which it was obvious that the actors themselves had memorized lines without really understanding them, and the effect is numbing. Hence, a high school or community college production of, say, “Much Ado About Nothing,” is likely to be not only unfunny but PAINFUL.
But for illustration, watch the vdeo of Kenneth Branagh’s production of “Much Ado,” and you’ll notice a great difference in talent among the actors in the cast. When Branagh, Emma Thompson, or even Denzel Washington says a line in Elizabethan English, it’s hilarious. You actually understand every word because the ACTORS make the language seem natural. But much of the cast (Keanu Reeves and Robert Sean Leonard, especially) is so stiff, so incapable of understanding wha tthey’re saying, that they make little sense.
So it can be with modern productions of Greek or Roman plays. Bad actors in bad productions make the funniest OR most tragic Greek play seem like slow torture. But people who understand what the whole thing is about can be HILARIOUS.
Aristophanes’ plays are a lot like Monty Python sketches in this sense: they combine the cerebral and the silly. “The Clouds” has loads of intellectual jokes AND lots of fart humor. When his plays are done right, they’re side-splittingly funny even now. But if they’re presented as cultural spinach ("it’s CULTURE, it’s GOOD for you!), you’ll be bored stiff.