Reaping what the realpolitik reader reaped

One of my classmates in creative writing class today (while unnecessarily taking apart a harmless piece on the non-inclusive nature of Carnatic music):

... unpacking the article, going past the veneer of humour to see what prompted the writer to choose the medium...

My question is: in the medium-as-message context, does anything matter more than what the article is built to achieve? Or is the reader obliged to consider the medium, too?

Because if the realpolitik reader stepped in and took away the humour from a humourous article, doesn't it achieve faster what could otherwise have been achieved by peeling and deconstructing what the writer wants to achieve?

Will not the humour tell the reader what is humourous? Or is the writer to be understood only in his psychological nudity - after the reader has stepped beyond the literary piece itself and has chosen to take nothing away from it but only that there is a medium, a message, and there is the "all-important reason" that those two were chosen and none else?