ABSTRACT
Legendary among his contemporaries as a practical joker, George Horatio Derby earned a national reputation as one of the West's funniest literary comedians. Using irreverent word play in his five dozen comical sketches and burlesques, he poked fun at pretension and credulity, especially any foolish belief in the omnipotence of scientific method and precision. An engineer himself, Derby understood the science of his day and was thereby able to discern its limitations and the misunderstandings of others. Whether Mark Twain already held such attitudes when he first read Derby's work is beside the point in view of the many obvious parallels between Twain's work and Derby's. Derby's comic techniques can be found in Menippean satire and the comic diatribes of the Cynic philosophers of Greece. Critics have said that along with much of the humor of his precursors, Derby's work anticipates the writing of twentieth-century humorists John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman and James Thurber.
