It's a sliding scale thing. Even if you never heard of Proust, you can probably still get a chuckle out the choral society trying to summarize his magnum opus

It's a sliding scale thing. Even if you never heard of Proust, you can probably still get a chuckle out the choral society trying to summarize his magnum opus in 15s and never getting past the "Proust in his first book, fa la la". But if you find it already amusing knowing nothing about it, you'd probably find it a bit funnier if you knew that, on the one hand, In Search of Lost time is thousands of pages and takes weeks or months to read, and, on the other, isn't exactly action-heavy. And probably still more if you could relate the attempted plot summaries to the book(s). And I don't think the ant poetry sketch would be funny at all to someone who doesn't recognize "Look on my feelers, termites, and despair" or any of the other lines and understands none of the Queen Victoria jokes.