The TV series had great humor. They sure gave it up for that first whacked-out movie, though.
If you think about the first feature film, it’s a lot like the first pilot that the network turned down as “too cerebral”. People like action movies, so of course TWOK was a much bigger success.
Oh yeah. The TV show had humor at times. The Voyage Home humor had lots of humor and reminded me a bit of the “in your face” humor of the one-off episode “the Trouble with Tribbles”.
in part this is blamed on robert wise - he had never worked on star trek wasn’t familiar with the story from the series, and even nixed some attempts to get humor in apparently.