What's wrong with a lighthearted take on Batman? I've always looked at it like this: Adam West's Batman was a spoof in a way similar to how Spaceballs spoofed Star Wars.
Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with a comedic take, no, but it wasn't a spoof in the sense of poking fun at something that was otherwise presented seriously at the time. Like I've said, the Batman comics of the '50s and '60s were very much like the show in their tone, telling adventure stories that were deliberately absurd and silly even though the characters treated them as serious matters. After all, the Comics Code didn't allow comics at the time to be violent or scary or dark, so that pretty much left humor and absurdity. The comedy came from the source.
This is why
Batman was a comedy while its sister show from the same producers,
The Green Hornet, was a straight crime drama: because both shows were faithful adaptations of their source materials. A lot of
Batman episodes were directly adapted from comic-book stories. Material was added to flesh them out, some details were changed for reasons of budget or practicality, but to a large extent they played out exactly the same on the show as they had in the comic.
So yes, it was a comedy, but no, it wasn't a spoof -- any more than the comics were spoofing themselves, at least. Certainly there was a heavy dose of self-aware irony to the show, but only in the sense that it was presenting the source with great accuracy and letting its inherent absurdity speak for itself, like when Andy Warhol did a painting of soup cans or Roy Lichetenstein copied comic-book panels right down to the color dots.
