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. He takes the stage at Aces on 80 again on June 25th at 8:00 p.m. to serve as master of ceremonies and opening act for his friend, fellow comedian Darryl Rhodes; he will return again for an encore of his own show on July 10th. “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.” By Erick Richman
JOURNEY TO – & FROM – COLUMBUS
J
erry 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 331 miles, walking from Atlanta 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 LocaL
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, 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 6
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 JUNE-JULY 2021
