Where did the tv/movie trope of hiccuping when drunk come from?

It was done in The Philadelphia Story (1940). Jimmy Stewart is drunk and talking to Cary Grant.

Stewart claimed that during the scene he ad libbed a hiccup. And Grant immediately ad libbed right back, "Excuse me".

Vivien Leigh did it in Gone With the Wind (1939)

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Off the top of my head W.C. Fields?

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With Stewart improvising it I presume it was already a cliche by 1940, but I can't think of an earlier example OTTOMH

I haven't watched WCF in quite some time. He often played drinking characters, but how often did he actually play drunk?

Ummm, because you tend to hiccup while drunk. I know you’re not a drinker, but when you get shithoused hiccuping isn’t uncommon and you get pissed off about it.

I don't want to go too far off the deep end here, but I'm going to guess it probably came from the fact that you sometimes get the hiccups when drunk.

Well yeah, but when did it first occur on the screen?

It's not like most people hiccup when drunk but that became the go to sign that a person was drunk in a movie.

Just like most people don't buy a French Banquette everytime they go the food market but that bageuutte sticking out the brown bag alerts the audience the person in the movie just went shopping.

A hiccup became a cheap and easy way to convey to the audience that the character was inebriated without showing reels of him or drinking.

And it probably did start with cartoons because they had to convey things quickly.

He wasn't the first, but Foster Brooks was the best at it.

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Ummm, because you tend to hiccup while drunk. I know you’re not a drinker, but when you get shithoused hiccuping isn’t uncommon and you get pissed off about it.

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I am definitely a drinker and I can accurately state that I have never gotten drunk and started hiccuping.

You can get hiccups from drinking anything, but it doesn’t exactly correlate specifically with alcohol.

Think about Fields almost every day because I get a lot of Chickadees on my bird feeders. They are my favorite bird, because they are fearless. One was on a peanut butter cake at the same time a woodpecker was on the other side yesterday. Most of the other larger birds wouldn't be near a woodpecker.

Some doctors believe that hiccups are related to brain chemistry, There's the possibility that alcohol may "fire off a tripwire" that effects the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to various organs, including the diaphragm.