That's pretty much the bread and butter of reddit comments. It might be an interesting post and there is definitely interesting conversation somewhere in there...but you've got to wade through a large amount of puns and people thinking they are funny. Those things usually lead to highly upvoted large comment threads that have no relation to the original submission.

If there's a system in place to gain points then people are going to take the easy road with silly jokes and odd comments in an attempt to get points rather than contribute to the discussion.