Paul Taylor emptied a barrelful of monkeys onto the City Center stage Tuesday night when his “Troilus and Cressida (reduced)” was presented to New York audiences for the first time. “Reduced” is the operative word here: The ballet uses a condensation of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours” from the opera “La Gioconda,” and the tone is considerably more boisterous than the high tragedy of Shakespeare’s play or the romance in verse by Chaucer on which it’s based. Here, awash in buffoonery, is one of the most frenetically riotous episodes ever seen on the Taylor stage. Less than 10 minutes long, it’s over before you know it and plays like a revue or musical comedy number, harking back to the parodistic journeys to the worlds of mythological and ancient civilization presented on Broadway and in the ballet world in the 1930s and ’40s.

Mr. Taylor frames his bagatelle with ludicrously grandiose tableaux that set in higher relief the roughhouse shenanigans that ensue. In the original story, a Trojan patrician, Troilus, is persuaded by Pandarus, uncle of the proud and aloof Cressida, to woo her until her reserve dissolves into passion.

But here, Mr. Taylor’s retelling reverses all the original polarities. Cressida’s passage from reluctance to ardor is given quite a tweak. Danced by Lisa Viola, Mr. Taylor’s heroine is sleeping when the instruments of Aphrodite awaken her; she arises reluctantly, but soon she is the amorous aggressor. And she needs to be, because lovestruck Troilus, danced by Robert Kleinendorst, is not an elegant, valiant, and cultivated swain but rather a hapless klutz, descended from the baggy pants clowns of vaudeville and burlesque. The venerable banana peel here becomes a pillow or anything else that Troilus happens to encounter in his bumbling staggers around stage. He’s a maladroit oaf who struggles to keep his pants upright; he constantly hikes them up to no avail, and when they drop to the ground, a garish pair of briefs is revealed. The dancing hippos in Disney’s “Fantasia” segment set to this same music are far more nimble.

Then there are three marauding warriors, victorious Greeks into whose hands Cressida is eventually delivered by her traitorous father.

Mr. Taylor’s sendup concludes with a melee, in which Troilus yet again hits the deck, only to be stomped on by the battling factions. But love finally reigns supreme: The cupids, the Greeks, and Troilus and Cressida are all in clinches by the final blackout.

Mr. Taylor’s escapade, first performed by his company last year during a season in Syracuse, references an entire repertory of slapstick and comic devices, which he recapitulates with faultless precision. He mocks the obviousness of the punctuations in Ponchielli’s score and turns them into punch lines by a sly gesture. His demand for razor’s edge comic timing was impeccably delivered by his dancers on Tuesday night, when merriment reigned onstage and in the audience.