Early in his hilarious and moving memoir, Gary Shteyngart reveals that his mother’s post-collegiate nickname for him is Little Failure, which would seem more insulting if his father didn’t already call him Snotty. In this Russian Jewish family — the Shteyngarts moved from Leningrad to Queens in 1979, when Gary was 7 — barbed jokes, or shutki, are tokens of love: weird, hostile tokens, but tokens nonetheless. The shutki continue to fly in Shteyngart’s direction even after — or maybe especially after — he becomes a successful novelist (“The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” “Absurdistan,” “Super Sad True Love Story”). Treating his parents to dinner at the revolving restaurant atop the Marriott Marquis to celebrate his mother’s birthday, Shteyngart is a sitting duck as his father fires off this one: “I read on the Russian Internet that you and your novels will soon be forgotten.” While that may not sound exactly like a joke, it’s riotous compared with what he tells his son at another dinner: “I burn with a black envy toward you. I should have been an artist as well.”

Shteyngart’s father is a depressive, a fate his childhood seemed to decree. His four earliest memories are the wartime evacuation of Leningrad, the deaths of his father and his best friend, and the sight of a female relative leaping from a second-story window, pursued by rats. Later, Shteyngart’s grandmother “is remarried to a man who will all but destroy my father’s life and make me into whatever it is I am today.” Professionally, his father is thwarted in his ambition to become an opera singer and has to settle for being an engineer (hence the black envy).

And yet, for all his Chekhovian gloom, Shteyngart’s dad is still capable of enlivening Gary’s childhood by telling him outlandish, funny stories, like “The Planet of the Yids,” a sci-fi saga about a Jewish planet under constant attack by volleys of pork. Shteyngart summarizes his father’s duality — and his own — by referring to “the rage and humor that are our chief inheritance.” “Little Failure” is so packed with humor, it’s easy to overlook the rage, but it’s there, and it’s part of what makes the book so compelling. It even lurks in some of the photo captions, like the one under a snapshot of Shteyngart and his mother, taken shortly after their move to Queens: “One of the few photographs we have from this period. We were too busy suffering.”

The Shteyngarts come to the United States as part of the wave of Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate under an agreement Jimmy Carter made with the Soviet government. In Shteyngart’s précis, “Russia gets the grain it needs to run; America gets the Jews it needs to run: all in all, an excellent trade deal.” Arriving in what until very recently had been enemy territory, Shteyngart is anxious and asthmatic, shepherded by parents who are unburdened by any understanding of American life. They change his Russian name, Igor, to the more American-sounding Gary so he will “suffer one or two fewer beatings”; that is pretty much the only cultural adaptation they get right. They receive a letter from Publishers Clearing House informing them that they have already won $10 million and believe this to be true. (Somehow, years of being lied to by the Soviet government have not prepared them for this moment.)