Shakespeare and Slapstick

Shakespeare has a reputation for being difficult to read at first, and this is probably what comes to mind when we think of him. We know he wrote dramas, histories, tragedies, and comedies. As I will discuss in a later blog, what are deemed his comedies many not have struck us as all that hilarious the first time, especially when reading it, and this is where I want to draw a parallel.
Many teachers will tell you that "Shakespeare was meant to be seen and performed, rather than read in an academic setting". They will continue to tell you that without it being performed live something is missing. If you have ever seen a play, or multiple renditions of the same play, but read it first in an academic setting, you probably realize that (a) the play can be performed in many different ways according to interpretation and (b) it can be a lot funnier than you originally imagined while wading through Shakespeare's heavy dialogue in text format (heavy especially for modern readers who no longer use some of the same words and who no longer use some words or phrases the same way).
Slapstick may be similar in one way, namely that it seems to draw more laughs in its performed rather than textual format. This is probably not due to any jargon or heavy dialogue, although some of the works we have read are dated (much farther than Grawe allows comedy's theoretical shelf-life to be), but instead it is due to the format alone. We would have the same problems in Shakespeare even if he spoke in "plain English" instead of what some readers tend to assume is almost a different language (you have no idea how many times people tell me they cannot read Shakespeare's Middle English, an entirely different language, but not what he actually used which is the same English as ours). Slapstick works that we have read, for example much of Mark Twain's works, contain few words that we do not know, yet a number of us find slapstick much funnier in the visually performed format. Mark Twain himself performed his written works cross-country.
Why would he do this? Why wouldn't he just let people stay at home and read his works? The performance does something to increase the audience's enjoyment level. If you read a transcript of Chris Rock for example, and then saw him perform, which is funnier? You would probably laugh at the transcript, but would laugh harder at the actual performance. Now one could argue that some things were never meant to be read, but performed, and probably only the most visually imaginative people or actors could visualize the things that were meant to be performed. What about the things in both formats however? Can slapstick really be done on paper and have the same effect as a performance? Can slapstick be written solely for the textual medium and not the visual mediums as we know that many visual-medium-slapsticks are made solely for the visual medium ("to be performed, not read")?