Before Lily Tomlin and Gilda Radner fashioned their hair in pigtails and robed themselves in baby doll smock dresses for comedy sketches, there was Fanny Brice and her Baby Snooks radio routine.

Brice, a singer and comedienne par excellence, began her little girl impersonation act in the early 1930s as part of the Ziegfield Follies of the Air radio show. The comical antics of a mischievous and curious lisping toddler also appeared as part of the Good News show in 1937 and the Maxwell House Coffee Time program in 1940. But four years later, Baby Snooks finally got her own program, aptly called The Baby Snooks Show, in 1944. The show aired on CBS radio Sundays and Fridays.

With a perpetually patient Daddy (played by Frank Morgan, Alan Reed, and Hanley Stafford respectively), a prim and proper mother (Lilive Brownell and Arlene Harris) and a little brother with a grownup name, Robespierre (Lenore Ledux), Baby Snooks entertained American families with her constant questioning and eye-batting innocence in the face of reprimand.

The show aired until 1951, having switched to NBC radio in 1946 and ending only with the untimely death of its star at the age of 60. Nearly 20 years later, Brice’s life was celebrated in the loosely autobiographical Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif.