This simply is not the case.
He may not have been jovial, but he did have occasional glimpses of humor, most notably in his many letters. He is estimated to have written more than 100,000 letters to everyone from his wife, Sonia Green, to family members and many literary notables including Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, E. Hoffman Price and others.
In some of these letters, he created nicknames for himself and others based on the dark creations of his fiction. He signed his letters Eich-Pi-El. He called Smith “Klarh-Ash-Ton” and Howard “Two-Gun Bob.”
The Cats of Eich-Pi-El
He also wrote numerous essays, mostly serious, but occasionally filled with wry humor.
When, somehow in fannish delirium, an argument got started about which was better, the cat or the dog. Lovecraft wrote a nearly-6,000-word essay called “Cats and Dogs” in 1926.
In part he wrote: “Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur to me to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have for monkeys, human beings, tradesmen, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls; but for the cat I have entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy. … We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile up in favour of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic significance in all the cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat excels so brilliantly that all comparisons collapse.”
Unnameable Humor
There even is one short story, “The Unnameable,” that not only is humorous, but also is a direct poke at his own style of writing.
To find the humor in this story, it’s important to be familiar with HPL’s other work. In particular, his writing that August Derleth named The Cthulhu Mythos. These writings contain what later filmmakers would pull their hair out over. HPL refuses to thoroughly describe all the dark and horrible creatures that either attack or simply are seen by his characters. He only gives vague descriptions of alien geometry and sights so horrible they drive the observer insane.
Apparently, readers of his time complained about this because, while he never changed the style, he did write “The Unnameable”
Lovecraft wrote: “Besides, he added, my constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.”
In the course of the story, he tells his friend a ghostly tale while sitting in a cemetery. He also stands up for his use of “unnameable.”
HPL: “And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter, why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes — or absences of shapes — which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly ‘unnamable?’ ‘Common sense’ in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.”
HPL was a funny guy.
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