Eric Hyman: Let me make a counter-suggestion to the inclusion of Pnin in the “Ten Funniest Books.”  The first time I read Pnin, yes, I did find it “profoundly funny,” but in all my subsequent readings I found it much more profoundly sad..." (comments on http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/70492-10-funniest-books.html [   ] "Pnin, Nabokov’s more straightforward novel of émigré dislocation, might be funnier joke for joke, but Pale Fireis, I think, more profoundly funny, more fundamentally funny, since the funniness is built into the form itself: our mad narrator Charles Kinbote constructs an entire world through a misreading of John Shade’s poignant poem...")

Jansy Mello: An excellent suggestion to put multilevel "Pnin" into perspective.  Chance helped me to read various lines in "Pnin" in proximity to "Signs and Symbols" and the heartbroken but courageous character's plight under the Nazis so poignantly present in both, despite their different narrative choices: there is no irony in the short-story and no authorial cruelty (as we may find it being voiced by the Narrator in the novel when he seduces his audience into cruel laughter -  like it happens in Cervantes' Dom Quixote...).