or is it because it was more of a comedy story rather than SCI-Fantasy Horror theme that HPL didn't want to lose "credibility" in his main genre?
Now, that opens up an interesting aspect of discussion concerning HPL. While to modern readers, and from the mid-1920s on to fantasy/horror readers, he has been known as a writer of tales of cosmic horror (and occasionally a more traditionally Gothic tale, such as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or "The Rats in the Walls", etc.), to the readers of the amateur journals of his day, which is where so much of his earlier works were published before the advent of Weird Tales, he was known as a writer of weird tales and poetry, yes... but also as a critic, conservative pundit, and prolific writer of humorous, pastoral, and occasionally political, verse. He also wrote a wonderful piece (published in the United Amateur for September 1917, the same year he wrote "The Tomb" and "Dagon") titled "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson", posing as his pseudonymous persona Humphrey Littlewit, Esq., who had been born in 1690 (and was thus 227 years old), written in a flawless Georgian style. It is a send-up of his own Georgian favorites, of himself, and of amateur foibles in general.
In addition to these, he also wrote a handful of other humorous or comic pieces, such as "Old Bugs" (which was a charmingly owlish piece scolding his young friend Alfred Galpin for his alcoholic binge the day before Prohibition went into effect, and was, again, never published during HPL's lifetime), "Ibid", which was a tongue-in-cheek pseudo-scholarly history of the incredibly prolific historian and scholar Ibidus; and such little squibs (written with his youthful correspondent and distant relation, Robert H. Barlow) as "The Battle That Ended the Century" and "Collapsing Cosmoses" (both of which sent up the fantasy/sf community of the time; the latter particularly aiming at the ludicrousness of the space opera).
While not as unknown as it used to be, it is still not that generally well-known that HPL had a sparkling sense of humor, was often quite witty (and could be, on occasion, savagely sarcastic, as in "Medusa: A Portrait"), and could in fact be "the life of the party", when he chose. Reading a selection of his letters, for instance, gives a very different view of the man than one would get from the popular conception of him as a gloomy, dour, writer obsessed with the weird and supernatural (especially that which also sees him as genuinely into the occult, something for which he had little but contempt). However, a close reading will show aspects of this even in his weird fiction, on occasion, usually as a wry comment or a bit of parody of this or that social, literary, or religious aspect which he desired to lampoon. And then there are the various in-jokes which crop up throughout his fictional (and poetical) career....
He did wish to not mingle humor and horror in any obvious sense, as he felt that diluted the effect of a weird tale; but doing it in such a way that only the cognoscenti were likely to catch, seems to have been something of a different kettle of fish. Whether or not he would have desired to avoid publishing in the various types of writing is a question I can't answer; most of his humorous prose writing he simply did as a
jeu d'esprit to be shared with friends (or at times just for his own amusement); but the fact that he raised no objection when a friend of his wanted to publish his "Ibid" (which never occurred, sadly) might be seen as an indication that, had he felt more confident in his abilities in such a field, he might also have stepped outside the weird field professionally....
