The sad clown is a time-honored trope. “Smile when your heart is aching,” a song composed by Charlie Chaplin advised, and that’s essentially the message in “Jeff Ross: Take a Banana for the Ride,” a new one-man show written and performed by the New Jersey-bred comedian.
Mr. Ross, who is making his Broadway debut, became prominent working in a milieu whose titans extend from Don Rickles to Ricky Gervais: insult comedy. Known to his fans as the “Roastmaster General,” Mr. Ross has skewered celebrities ranging from Joan Rivers to Tom Brady at New York’s storied Friars Club and in television specials.
Over 90 minutes, “Banana” offers its share of acidic and off-color humor. At a recent preview, Mr. Ross, decked out in a yellow blazer and pants (natch) over a T-shirt bearing the image of the late, great Gilbert Gottfried — a friend and fellow spirit — immediately began ribbing members of the audience, then shifted to self-effacement, in his fashion.
“I know I look like Bruce Willis,” noted the funny man — who reveals here that he suffers from alopecia, a condition that has rendered him bald and without perceptible eyebrows — “if his trainer also had dementia.” A musical tribute to Mr. Ross’s ethnic tribe follows in the show, built around the warning, “Don’t mess with the Jews,” except “mess” is replaced by another four-letter word.
But the overarching point of this autobiographical journey is that Mr. Ross’s comedy stems from pain and loss, and hair is the least of it. As some of his admirers may know, the performer lost both of his parents while still in his teens, his mother to leukemia, his father to drug abuse. He then became a caretaker to his beloved maternal grandfather, who inspired the show’s title — it was his advice to Ms. Ross whenever he took a trip — and watched him slowly succumb to age.
More recently, Mr. Ross has seen a string of close friends and colleagues die, including Gottfried, and he was diagnosed with cancer himself. “I almost died last year,” he tells the audience.
These developments are recalled in often exhaustive detail in what is fundamentally a valentine to Mr. Ross’s loved ones: friends and family, living and deceased — mostly the latter — and eventually fans, whom the comedian counts as members of his “army,” as he puts it.
We learn about one Uncle Murray, a medic in the actual Army who helped liberate a concentration camp during World War II. Mr. Ross reads letters written by his beloved parents, and repeatedly praises his younger sister, Robyn, insisting, “She’s the funniest one in the family. She’s a special ed teacher. So, she always has new material.”
Here and throughout, Mr. Ross is, for the most part, careful to balance his gushing with the gleefully impolite humor that is his bread and butter. Stefania Bulbarella’s projection design, featured on several screens that dominate Beowulf Boritt’s set, surrounds him with photos and video clips documenting his life and career, dating back to infancy.
“Banana” is at its funniest, and its most poignant, when Mr. Ross turns his attention to four close buddies who have passed on, one of them canine. The humans include Gottfried, who in footage that made me laugh out loud (as Gottfried often did) is captured singing “Sunrise, Sunset” from “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Two other celebrated comedians, Norm Macdonald and Bob Saget, are remembered just as fondly, but the segment that tickled and touched me the most centers on Nana, a rescued German Shepherd who helped Mr. Ross stay sane during the pandemic. “This dog had to be like early 30s,” he recalls, “hair missing … a bottle of scotch under her arm, still owed Michael Vick $2,500.”
Mr. Ross was persuaded to adopt another, younger dog of the same breed. They were “the worst guard dogs,” he notes, “because if anybody ever broke into my house, they’d be like, ‘The Jew’s in there! He’s sleeping in there!’” Trust me, it’s more hilarious in Mr. Ross’s delivery, as is the song he imagines Nana singing at the end of her life, pronouncing the refrain, “You’re vun of the good vuns.”
Toward the end, Mr. Ross proposes that people are like bananas: “The more bruised we get, the sweeter we are. And we’re mushy on the inside.” Happily, “Banana” offers enough sweetness, and spice, to make the mush forgivable.
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