Their work required them to travel. The resort circuit was seasonal, and entertainers who depended on it spent much of the year away from home or uprooted from one engagement to the next. The young Joseph—who would not become Jerry until later—spent stretches of his childhood with relatives while his parents were on the road. He joined the family act at the age of five, appearing on stage in some capacity, and as a teenager he developed what was called a “record act,” a comic pantomime in which he would lip-sync and mime to recordings of other famous singers with exaggerated physical comedy.
He received approximately one year of formal high school education before leaving school entirely. He was not an academic; he was a performer. The world he grew up in was one in which talent on a stage was the primary currency, and he had been immersed in it from infancy. By his mid-teens he was working the same circuit his parents had worked, navigating the world of small venues, club owners, and the constant hustle of show business in an era when live entertainment was the dominant popular form.
In October 1944, at the age of eighteen, he married Esther Calonico, who performed under the name Patti Palmer and was herself a band singer. They were very young, even by the standards of the time. She was twenty; he was eighteen. The marriage would last—officially, through separation and complicated transition—for nearly four decades, and it would produce six sons.