It had to refer to at least an obscene gesture as early as 1942: in the Warner Bros. cartoon A Tale of Two Kitties (debut of Tweety, and of cats Babbitt and Catstello), Babbitt keeps pestering Catstello to “give me the bird,” until Catstello breaks the fourth wall and delivers the aside, “If the Hays Office would only let me, I’d give him the ‘boid,’ all right!”