Betting On Myself ~ Jerry Farber's

JOURNEY TO – & FROM – COLUMBUS

By Erick Richman

Jerry Farber walks with a striking, determined pace that seems almost at odds with the weight of his 83 years. In September, the storied comedian plans to carry that weight - on foot - for over 270 miles, walking from Columbus to Savannah in just about four weeks.

“Or eight,” he says with just a hint of humor. “There’s no deadline to end this thing.”

A Career of Gigs

Jerry walks fast, but he’s even quicker when he talks: schmoozing up wedding guests on the porch of the Rothschild-Pound House Inn (201 7th Street) with the unbridled self-deprecation of a man who first climbed on stage in 1951.

Seventy years ago, Jerry – in an Arthurian moment of fate - snatched the microphone from some hack comic who’d been hired for his bar mitzvah. At his mother’s insistence, he started telling jokes.

He was hooked immediately.

“Of all the drugs that people could do,” he says, “I would recommend comedy. It’s contagious to get strangers to laugh together, at you or with you.”

Even 40 years out from being carded for liquor, he’s still that same child on the inside.

“When I perform, it’s heartfelt. I’m not actually a bad man character. It’s naïve, it’s from a 12-year-old who looks older.”

The Atlanta paragon – a pianist and comedian who has been charming and disarming audiences in the region for decades – still revels in defying expectation and simple definition.

“I think I’m one of the luckiest, weird looking old guys because I’m still relevant to some people doing what I’ve done since I’m twenty-one. That’s very special.”

How does it feel to be still going, still growing, and still booking gigs in 2021?

“It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened,” he says. “I feel like a child stealing the third cookie. I’m getting away with a lot.”

Vaccinated and Back at It

Having ridden out the pandemic safely so far, he is back to pickpocketing laughs out of even the roughest hearts.

His first gig of the year was at the Aces on 80 Bar and Grill in Ladonia, Alabama.

He was nervous.

“These people are hardcore. Military, tough guys, tattoos,” he says. “I thought I was going to bore them.”

The club’s last five or six comedians were all duds. Jerry was their last bet; if he bombed, the owner didn’t plan to try again.

Arriving home that night, Jerry found an extra fortyfive dollars in his underpants: tips from adoring women, tucked in during his “totally absurd” on-stage striptease à la the 1997 film The Full Monty. Having kept his eyes closed during the dance, he hadn’t noticed.

“I haven’t had that extra laugh in a long time,” he says. “They’re just well-lived people, and they were getting close to my soul. Not just something that I did that was funny.”

After the show, Jerry received two invitations: to stay late for drinks and laughs and to perform there again.

“They just let me be,” he laughs. “That’s a great relief because I know I’m not hip and I don’t have to act like I am.”

Looking forward to September as he reflects on what he learned from the show, he says that sharing such authentic laughter with people who seemed so intimidating at first glance “was almost related to the walk in a way.”

“It was a smaller situation, but how gratifying it was to be relevant,” he says. “It touched my heart. I needed that.”

“By the way,” he adds in that quick-talk drawl of his, “the food is very good.”

Coming to Columbus

Though it’s been thirty-five years since he gave up the “junkie” lifestyle of sports betting that made his life a “wreck,” he calls the planned walk “the gamble of my lifetime,” saying that he’s finally “betting on myself, with support from many, many friends.”

“Which,” he adds with a smirking pause, “I have.”

Many of those friends are back in Atlanta, but he’s found new ones – as well as new inspiration - in the Fountain City.

“I may have stumbled into it, but I hit a reasonable lottery when I came here.”

Crowded and priced out of his long-time Midtown Atlanta neighborhood, making the 100-mile move south to the city of Columbus made sense - not to retire, but to continue working in “a pleasanter surrounding, without traffic jams and lots of commotion.”

“Columbus does that for me,” he says, “even with all of its chaos.”

As columnist Bo Hiers wrote in his May 9, 2021 profile of Jerry for SaportaReport, local business owner and Jerry-friend Buddy Nelms had encouraged Jerry to bring his “gentle, liberal, Jewish self” down to Columbus, saying to “expect a few skirmishes,” but assuring Jerry that “generally everything will be fine.”

The statement was prescient.

“I didn’t even hit that guy who told me ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job,’” Jerry says, recalling the night he was accosted by a drunk man at a Columbus bar in early 2021. “I took the high road, because you have to.”

photo taken by Monica Jones

Even when faced with hate, he still calls for caring.

“I really think we’re all we have. If we don’t get into people, understand, try to be understanding, then we’re done.”

A Familiar Cause

Jerry served on the board of the Peachtree-Pine homeless shelter in Atlanta for a quarter-century.

Seeing people who were so alone “staggered” him, he says with a rattle in his voice. “Like, really, socked me in the jaw.”

He realized that, despite (or even due to) his many trials and failings, he had inside himself a “capacity to do more than tell jokes in a club.”

“What it was about was me being informed by the homeless,” he says with heavy retrospection, “not me really helping them.”

It’s easy to “sit back and criticize,” he says, but “when people lose everything, all that’s left is connecting with humans.”

Deciding to Walk

Jerry credits the musical artist Mike Posner with inspiring him to keep moving.

Posner, finding at 31-years-old that fame and wealth had left him feeling empty and without meaning, set out to walk 2,851 miles across the country. In a 2019 interview with Time magazine, Posner said he hoped “to share this concept of becoming somebody you’re actually proud of.”

“All that money he made as a star wasn’t satisfactory to him,” Jerry says. “He said the words, ‘I need to be uncomfortable.’ Same here. I related to it.”

Jerry called his 21-year-old son Joshua to ask if he knew of Posner, only to learn that Joshua was already a fan.

Motivated by his experiences with those in need, Jerry determined to raise enough money for two thousand care bags – “underwear, socks, toothpaste, toothbrush, something to eat, and a list of phone numbers” to distribute to those living on the street.

Still, he’s frank that the walk is, ultimately, about him, for him.

“I’m doing this for me. I want to get off my fucking ass and do something relevant. That’s the essence of what this is about.”

Carrying Forward the Past

“I’ve always been a little bit neurotic,” he says, “but aware that there are always more people that need a helping hand. I’ve been given many helping hands.”

For example, he initially planned to sleep in a tent for his walk. A friend told him, “Jerry, you’re 83. Get real. You’re not sleeping on the ground.”

Jerry finally agreed to sleep in a van owned by a young musician friend, with the occasional cheap hotel for a shower. One of many young people inspired and compelled by Jerry’s surprising vitality, the musician will drive the van while Jerry walks.

Already having walked hundreds of miles in preparation, the funnyman will have accumulated thousands more under his toes by September.

Still, those first steps will be heavy.

Though friends, press, and his son plan to be there, in many ways he wants to – and will - be alone for the journey.

“I need alone time,” he says. “I bother myself, and other people bother me just as much or more.”

The adage ‘comedy is tragedy given time’ implies that every joke is built on truth; his family and longtime friends have all already taken their final steps.

“I’ve been to more funerals than anybody I know, even at my age. Most of them are family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, parents. They all hurt.”

He says it’s important to feel and acknowledge that pain, but also to continue on with living.

“The person gone doesn’t feel your pain.”

photo taken by Monica Jones

Betting on Himself

He plans to begin his walk on September 26, winding his way through small towns and “forgotten places’’ on his way to the coast. Jerry welcomes donations to help those facing homelessness through his GoFundMe page, which can be found through Google under the name Jerry Farber’s Walk On Hope. Updates on the walk will be posted on the Jerry Farber’s Walk On Hope Facebook page.

Some of his younger friends plan to join him; a few others are doubtful he can finish the walk, but offer to donate anyway. Calling out “that arrogance of not knowing what you speak,” he clearly takes a thrill in wearing down “these walls that people place with their own opinions.”

“Naysayers are just pouring gasoline on my already ongoing fire,” he says. “Walking out there with the gnats, the mosquitos, maybe a rodent here and there… I’m looking forward to it.”

A gambler even after 35 years with no bookie, Jerry still likes to play the odds.

“Hold the donation,” he says to the doubters.

“And if I finish, will you double it?”