The funniest Lem story for me is from the Star Diaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries). It's th

The funniest Lem story for me is from the Star Diaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries). It's the story where he - alone - travels in his rocket ship and a tiny meteor destroys the steering mechanism. He has everything he needs to fix it, the only problem: Simultaneously somebody needs to do something on the outside and on the inside of the spaceship. But he is alone. He is lucky though, on the star maps he finds a few space/time bending vortexes. He manages to manipulate the rockets to fly through that cluster of vortexes. Then, during the next night, he wakes up - someone who looks exactly like him woke him up and asks him to go and help him with the repairs. He refuses because he thinks he is in a dream and repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. He prefers sleep undisturbed by such dreams. The next evening the situation is the opposite: He goes to his room and finds someone looking exactly like him sleeping in his bed. He wakes him up and tries to convince him to do repairs, but the sleepy guy refuses because repairs performed in a dream don't help with the real world problem. The space/time vortexes somehow made him appear as different versions of himself on the ship. The story continues with ever more complicated plots between various instances of himself. There even is a bit of violence when Ijon of Wednesday finds Ijon of Saturday with a blue eye (like someone hit him) and later it turns out Ijon of Thursday had hit Ijon of Friday in there encounter. Or something like that, it's just extremely funny. At the end of the vortex cluster there are so many versions of Ijon on the spaceship they have to hold a congress with public order and an agenda and lots and lots of discussions. Turns out you can't even rely on yourself, he never manages to get exactly one other person to join with the repairs. Either he cannot convince the other guy for various reasons ("I'm you from Saturday and the controls have not been repaired yet. So it makes no sense for me to join you, from Wednesday, because if the repairs had been done on Wednesday I would know!"), or there are two many but only two space suits and they argue until the next vortex removes too many people and they have to start from scratch. Really, check it out, the Ijon Tichy "Star Diaries" are about the funniest stories out there, and are quite deep too. Definitely a treasure. I read almost all of Lem's books in my (East German) childhood.