If I had ambitions, in fact, it was not toward respectability. I kept wanting to write funny material.

Humor is a funny thing, however -

All right, humor is a peculiar thing, if you have a prejudice against a witty play on words. There is no way of being almost funny or mildly funny or fairly funny or tolerably funny. You are either funny or not funny and there is nothing in between. And usually it is the writer who thinks he is funny and the reader who thinks he isn’t.

Naturally, then, humor isn’t something a man should lightly undertake; especially in the early days of his career when he has not yet learned to handle his tools. – And yet almost every beginning writer tries his hand at humor, convinced that it is an easy thing to do.

I was no exception. By the time I had written and submitted four stories, and had, as yet, sold none, I already felt it was time to write a funny story. I did. It was Ring Around the Sun, something I actually managed to sell and which was eventually included in THE EARLY ASIMOV.

I didn’t think it was successfully funny even at the time it was written. Nor did I think several other funny stories I tried my hand at, such as Christmas on Ganymede (also inTHE EARLY ASIMOV)and Robot AL-76 Goes Astray (included inTHE REST OF THE ROBOTS,Doubleday, 1964) were really funny.

It wasn’t till 1952 that (in my own mind only; I say nothing about yours) I succeeded. I wrote two stories,BUTTON, BUTTONandTHE MONKEY’S FINGER,in which I definitely thought I had managed to do it right. I was giggling all the way through each one, and I managed to unload both on Startling Stories, where they appeared in successive issues,BUTTON, BUTTONin the January 1953 issue andTHE MONKEY’S FINGERin the February 1953 issue.