Yes, comedy was popular, but was it the same kind of comedy that we enjoy these days, with the self-deprecating humor like in Seinfield?

I'll just copy/paste part of my other comment:

Comedy is notoriously contextual and cultural, and what makes sense to one group of people in one context may make little sense to another group in a different setting. It usually requires that the audience be aware of a particular set of social, political, and cultural references that may only make sense to those involved. Language can also have a huge impact on how comedy is performed and perceived, and often something amusing in one tongue, or even dialect or accent, may not translate at all to another.

You probably wouldn't understand a lot of contemporary German or Chinese or Maori humour, for instance, because you don't share their cultural cues and language quirks.

What I'm saying that there's no real contradiction here: the common people found burning cats hilarious (also slapstick comedy, and all other kinds of humor like that) and enjoyed themselves in that kind of fun often, the philosophers found that to be in bad taste and an all around bad thing to enjoy. Our kind of humor didn't exist in enough quantity to register above the burning-cats-lol-noise.

Frankly, all this tells me is that little has changed. There's still people out there who think burning cats is funny. There's people out there who think rape or murder are funny. There's people out there who think people getting violently wounded in accidents is hilarious.

And then there's the people who criticize that kind of humour and consider it banal, offensive, and sometimes even dangerous.

If the graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum is anything to judge by, we haven't changed as much as we like to think we have.