Since the death of Don Rickles in 2017, Jeff Ross has been insult comedy’s top banana. His most famous running gig, throwing barbed one-liners as the host of celebrity roasts at the Friar’s Club and eventually on Comedy Central, has earned him the sobriquet “Roastmaster General.” He has even come to resemble Rickles a bit in recent years; his frame is thick, and a wide mouth dominates his thumblike head. (As a result of alopecia, he is bald as a ping-pong ball except for a scraggly mustache.) But a typical Rickles set found him humorously savaging his audience with brief interludes of sentimentality and an envoi to assure the crowd that it was all in loving fun and he was actually a mensch—whereas Ross, in his Broadway solo show Take a Banana for the Ride, turns that structure inside out. If you’ve come to be insulted, you’ll have to wait: The first 80 minutes are the sweetie part, and only at the end does he walk down the aisles to skewer volunteers on the fly.
Ross avoids the ethnic stereotyping typical of Rickles—and his contemporary Jackie Mason, whose shows were a staple of Broadway from the 1980s through the 2000s—except when it comes to himself. Take a Banana for the Ride is explicitly grounded in Ross’s Jewishness, which he credits in part with his penchant for jokes. (“My real last name is Lipshultz,” he says. “‘That’s an old Hebrew word that means, ‘Hey, you oughta change that.’”) He was a black-belt karate kid, but he quickly learned that humor could also be useful against bullies; “Don’t fuck with the Jews!” he sings, inviting the audience to sing along, in a braggadocious number about his people’s contributions to the world. He attributes his thick skin to his “family of ballbusters,” who owned a popular catering hall in Newark.
Take a Banana for the Ride | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Jewish comedy is perhaps both a product of and a defense against the suffering that being a Jew has often entailed throughout history. But the particulars of Ross’s life have given him an extra share of heartache. “I learned early on that comedy wasn’t just in my blood,” he says. “It’s my superpower. And this is my origin story.” What follows is a litany of loss. Directed by Stephen Kessler and dramaturged by Mike Birbiglia's longtime consigliere, Seth Barrish, Take a Banana for the Ride is not a comedy routine per se but a nostalgic journey of gratitude salted with off-color jokes and out-of-tune singing with an onstage pianist and fiddler. There are many photos and home movies of his New Jersey childhood in the 1970s; there’s a love letter that his father sent to his mother in college. But above all, there’s death.
Ross’s self-survey begins with a tribute to his mother, who died of leukemia when he was 14. Then he moves on to his colorful father, who died when he was 19. From there Ross progresses to his grandfather, Pop Jack, a World War II veteran who had “worldbeater energy” and wore a ring made from metal that he salvaged from a German ship. Pop Jack dies. Ross then tells stories about three of his good friends, the comedians Gilbert Gottfried (dead), Norm Macdonald (dead) and Bob Saget (also dead). The Covid shutdown arrives, and Ross adopts a lovably mangy old dog named Nana; by this point, he is working the crowd for grief applause the way comics on the road goose a crowd with local references: “Clap if you’ve ever had to go through this,” he says of euthanizing a pet. Ultimately he arrives at his own recent cancer scare, which reminded him how lucky he is to have so many people he can turn to for support. (“It’s not just my friends and family,” he tells us. “It’s you guys.”)
One nice thing about bananas, Ross points out, is that “the more bruised they get, the sweeter they become.” Take a Banana for the Ride sometimes moves beyond sweet into downright mushy, but Ross is endearing company and includes enough funny material to help you ride out the schmaltz. (A good running joke finds Ross assigning Nazi voices to his German Shepherds, culminating in a Marlene Dietrich–style ballad.) “Stuff in your life you think you’ll never get over, you will get over,” he says. “You might even laugh about it someday.” Here, though, laughs are not the final goal. Vicious comedy may be Ross’s superpower, but this show aims to reveal his secret identity as the nicest of guys: an über-mensch.
Take a Banana for the Ride. Nederlander Theatre (Broadway). By Jeff Ross. Directed by Stephen Kessler. With Ross. Running time: 1hr 25mins. No intermission.
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Take a Banana for the Ride | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
