You are.
I found it quite funny. You have to have an understanding of the society being lampooned. At this point in history, you would need a familiarity with its context. The world has changed, although people haven't. If you get into any literature over 50 years old, it takes a little extra work, and empathy for lost worlds.
I love art museums, and have taken a long time to understand a lot of the older paintings. The kind of Christian symbolism a 16th century peasant would have understood flies right by me, as that's not my world. I've read the Bible, as it helps in understanding how people thought back then, but it's a book to me, not a lifestyle guide as it was to the classic painters and writers. I used to look at the paintings very literally, and miss what they were communicating. It took me time to learn their language, and why the subjects would have mattered. I've visited paintings 30 years after I first saw and was bored by them and been fascinated as what I had learned in the meantime let me see them more as a person of their time might have. I had to develop a background to catch the message - the small picture became a big picture then.
It's the same with literature. First we (hopefully) collect knowledge of our own times and concerns. Then we might read enough history and literature, or watch enough serious documentaries that we begin to "get" things we didn't earlier in our lives.
Some people read literally forever, and never catch the humour and cheekiness in a book like Don Quixote. Their brains aren't wired that way - if someone says a math equation is beautiful I shut up and smile, because my brain doesn't go there. But you're reading a book published in 1605, and their world was more science fiction to us than any science fiction writer has invented. Time travel takes preparation. There are a lot of older books I just didn't get when I was 25 that I think are brilliant now.
If you can't 'feel' it as a classic, be it visual art, music or writing, put it down and return to it in ten years.
