We can always try to contextualize Shakespeare nowadays with lit. theory of all sorts, but the likely answer is much simpler--audiences love scenes where low class individuals trade in paradoxes for comic effect. For ex: one of the most famous scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the "gravedigger" type scene where teh two field hands are basically piling up mud and making a fool of the knights that question them, utlizing similar paradoxes.
This scene was, perhaps, the "highlight" of the play. When David Garrick (the famous Shakespearean actor responsible, in large part, for 18th C. bardolatry) redrafted Hamlet for his 1772 performance, he cut out the scene altogether because he felt that audiences responded more to the gravediggers than they did to the entire plot.
I think that sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one in Shakespeare. The gravediggers are amusing, and their "maddening" discussion--garbed in paradox--is also paradoxically candid and straightforward. This provides a contrast to the "grave" aspects of Hamlet's ruse--where the King's motivations, Gertrude's motivations, and Hamlet's motivations, involving Polonius, R & G, in turn---do not have the same candid nature. They put an entire kingdom in peril, and their lies/misrepresentations don't have quick answers, wheras the gravediggers' ruses do.
By definition, it's satire. That's probably why audiences loved the scene, and why it's still a treasure to see the full scene on stage. Nearly every movie version of Hamlet cuts out everything but the Yorick speech.
The tenor of their speech is light, yet sophisticated. But their theme is fitted to the scene--it's gallows humor, quite literally.
In a play that has so much death in it, where suicide, murder, and Hamlet's intention to murder the King darken all humors, death provides a release, if only for a moment, from death.Strange how it all works out.
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