I think one of the funniest and darkest jokes of Pale Fire is that the titular poem is, on a technical level, not very good.
Kinbote spends the entire book waxing poetic about Shade's skill as a poet, how much of a critical darling he is, how every line is caked with hidden symbolism and meaning. Yet the rhetorical skill displayed in the poem is very basic. A lot of flowers are given to the opening line, "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain," and they should be. It's a haunting line, evoking the shock and pain of the Shades' unexpected loss of their daughter. It is not the only line of the poem, however. Pale Fire is an incredibly (I would argue excessively) verbose poem, which also contains lines like the following:
All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs...
If Shade is the poetic genius that Kinbote (an unreliable narrator, to say the least) leads us to believe, then surely one ought to expect better of him than such cringeworthy prose. I think there are a few different ways to read this, however. The first is that Shade is a pretentious blowhard, whose academic station insulates him from criticism. This is supported by Kinbote's claims about the way that the other professors fawn over him, as well as Shade's rants about political correctness and the youth. Under this reading Kinbote is fatally obsessed with a poet whose work is awful.
This is, in my opinion, immensely funny.
There is, however, a more empathetic reading available. Let us assume that John Shade is a skilled poet. This poem is immensely personal to Shade, as evidenced by the intimate conversations that Kinbote observes between John and Sybil about the poem, as well as the poem's content. This is a man baring his soul about the loss of his child. It doesn't matter to him if it's good; it's a work of passion, not meant for anyone but he and his wife. It's 999 lines of him trying to sort through the unimaginable trauma surrounding his daughter. I'm someone who believes that the emotion and humanity put into a piece of art is far more important than the technical skill that the piece displays. Regardless of the content of the poem, I respect it as a work and empathize with its fictional creator. This is one of the central horrors of Pale Fire: Kinbote's perversion of something so personal and private for a reading that disregards the central humanity of the piece, as well as his erasure of the women of the poem for the sake of his psychosexual obsession with Shade.
All of that said, there is also a third reading that combines the previous two. Under this reading, Shade is a conceited academic that writes awful poetry, and Pale Fire is his genuine attempt at writing a moving eulogy for his daughter. And, despite everything I've said about technical skill and creativity, that's really fucking funny.
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