Nederlander Theatre

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...