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Best remembered for lively comic sketches and uncanny animal imitations, this early 20th-century performer brought vaudeville energy to recordings as well as print. His surviving work suggests a showman who loved sound effects, character voices, and playful rural humor.
by Gilbert Girard
Gilbert Girard was an American entertainer and writer whose career crossed stage performance, recorded comedy, and light humor. Project Gutenberg lists him as the author of Daybreak at Calamity Farm and gives his birth year as about 1868, though many details of his life remain hard to verify.
Historical recording sources show that he was active from the early 1900s into the 1920s, appearing as a speaker, vocalist, whistler, and author on a large number of recordings. Much of that work featured comic scenes and animal imitations, which seems to have been his signature specialty.
Museum records from the V&A describe him performing in British music halls in the early 1900s as an "animal and instrumental mimic," and later note Broadway appearances in Penny Wise (1919) and Twelve Miles Out (1925). Even with the gaps in the record, Girard comes across as a versatile vaudeville-era performer whose humor was built to be heard as much as read.