Duck Soup

This Marx brothers film really awed me. It was so funny that it kept you laughing the whole time. But, in the section of Duck Soup that we saw in class, most of the things the characters were doing was really ridiculous stuff. How did they do it? How did they make such dumb antics so funny? How did they make repetitive actions of switching hats and holding each others' legs not get cheesy and boring? Was it just because everybody else in the room was laughing that I laughed so hard? Or was it really genuine gut-tickling humor that was the product of comic genius? Maybe in reality it was just as cheesy as the stuff they show on Disney channel. Maybe it just seems better quality to us today because it's from an older era, from the good old days.