Born in Chicago, Kirby broke into show business in the 1940s at the
Club DeLisa, a South Side establishment that employed a variety-show format and preferred to hire local singers, dancers, and comedians. His first recording was as a stand-up
blues singer, performing "Ice Man Blues" on a
Tom Archia session done in 1947 for
Aristocrat Records. He was one of the first
African-American comedians to appeal to white as well as Black audiences during the height of the
Civil Rights era, appearing between 1963 and 1972 on
Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall,
The Ed Sullivan Show,
The Dean Martin Show,
The Jackie Gleason Show,
The Temptations Show, ''
Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson''. In the mid 1950s,
Sammy Davis had broken ground doing impressions of White celebrities, leading the way for this to become more socially acceptable. As a gifted
impressionist, Kirby didn't mimick solely contemporary Black stars like
Bill Cosby and
Pearl Bailey. He also did impressions of White celebrities such as
John Wayne and
Walter Brennan, something still ostensibly provocative in the 1960s. Kirby was also a
bebop piano player and did song and vocal impressions of jazz greats
Louis Armstrong,
Nat King Cole,
Ella Fitzgerald, and
Joe Williams. He did a profoundly believable female and child voice, as well as an array of military and airline sound effects. In 1970, he was allowed to produce
The George Kirby Show, a television special, to gauge whether he could attract an audience for a weekly series. It led to his hosting
Half the George Kirby Comedy Hour, a
sketch comedy and
variety show, which lasted for 22 episodes in 1972; it was one of the actor-comedian
Steve Martin's first credits in front of the camera. The series was in many ways an uneasy compromise between Kirby's natural gifts and what the public would accept of Black actors at the time; a regular feature was a
shaggy dog story entitled the "Funky Fable". He was also a regular in the
ABC series
The Kopykats, with other impressionists such as
Rich Little,
Charlie Callas,
Marilyn Michaels, and
Frank Gorshin. Following the demise of his show, Kirby's career declined, especially as audiences began to look for more cutting-edge comedy.
HBO did include him in their
On Location With comedian series in the late 1970s, filming one of his many appearances at
Grossinger's in the NY Catskills, a club he had played regularly since 1961. His career never again reached its former heights, but he did register featured guest appearances on
Gimme a Break with
Nell Carter, ''
What's Happening Now!!, Crazy Like a Fox, and 227''. In 1983 he did a
USO tour with
Bob Hope to entertain the troops in
Beirut, Lebanon as part of the
multinational peacekeeping force. ==Imprisonment==