After his mother died when he was just 14 years old, as Jeff Ross tells us from the stage of Broadway’s Nederlander Theater, “I remember sitting in my room thinking, ‘Is this what life is? You think it’s one thing and it’s just another?’ Like when you go to a comedy show and some guy just starts talking about his dead relatives.” 

Ross, who’s best known as an insult comedian, is making his Broadway debut with what’s clearly not a live version of one of his comedy roasts. The awkward title is something his grandfather used to say to him, and both Grandpa and bananas wind up surprisingly prominent during what turns out to be an odd hybrid of a show. “Take A Banana For The Ride” is more memoir than standup; it’s as sad as it is funny, and ricochets between schmaltzy and offensive – all in the name of uplift.  

“I want tonight to be a cathartic experience for everybody,” he says when he first comes out, wearing a banana-yellow suit over a t-shirt picturing his deceased friend, the comedian Gilbert Gottfried. “I’ve become really good at cheering people up.”

This seems a dubious promise for much of the 90 minutes Ross is on stage. Many of his stories are about death – the death of both of his parents by the time he turned 19, his mother from cancer, his father cocaine abuse; and eventually his grandfather, who had moved in with him; the recent deaths of three comic friends, Gottfried, Norm Macdonald and Bob Saget; even the death of his rescue dog.

He also shares his medical conditions; he was born with a penis hole that was too small, so now he has two. He contracted alopecia and lost all his hair, most lamentably his “big Jew fro. I loved it. I took it everywhere.” He recently underwent treatment for colon cancer.

 But he threads, or at least punctuates, each of these downer stories with one-liners, some of them funny, some of them just in bad taste. (About his baldness, he says: “I know I look like Bruce Willis if his trainer also had dementia.”) And he pairs stories of suffering with stories of resilience; he follows up the story of the death of his dog with (spoiler alert) a cameo by his other dog.

 “Things you’re going through in your life, you think you’ll never get over, you’ll get over. I promise you,” he summarizes the lesson of the show. “You might even laugh about it someday.”

His claim to have created “Take A Banana for The Ride” to improve the lives of the audience might be greeted skeptically by those who recoil at his oversharing: He reads his parents’ letters aloud at some length (how they love each other, how they’re proud of him.) He details his childhood, including portraits of seemingly every individual member of his extended family, followed by a veritable timeline of his comedy career, all illustrated with a bombardment of videos and a hanging gallery full of decades of selfies, each within a gilded picture frame.

I couldn’t embrace everything about this show. But I couldn’t remain neutral either. For one thing, antisemites will hate it. He starts a lengthy routine by explaining that he earned a black belt in karate and developed comic retorts after being bullied in school, including by someone who called him a dirty Jew; this leads to his listing the many inventions by Jews (Prozac…Theory of Relativity…Pickles), and concludes by his inviting the audience to sing along with a jingle 

Don’t fuck with the Jews.
Don’t fuck with the Jews.
If you wanna hear cheers and not boos,
Never again, fuck with the Jews.

(On the other hand, plenty of Jews – and humans in general — might not be too crazy about another routine where he’s named his two German Shepherds Ausch and Schwitz, and have them talk like Nazis: “Wake up, Jew! Dog park, right schnow!”)

It might be embarrassing to admit that what most grabbed me were not so much the heartwarming tales of his feisty grandfather,  whom  he called Pop Jack, as the whole shtick with the bananas. I won’t spoil it completely (no pun intended) but here is why he finds a banana a useful metaphor:

“Bananas grow in bunches, and they protect each other. We get bruised, but we’re still good. In fact, the more bruised we get, the sweeter we are. And we’re mushy on the inside, and we’re protected by this outer layer, this thick skin.”

Jeff Ross: Take a Banana for the Ride
Nederlander Theater through September 28
Running time: About 90 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $69 – $209
Written and performed by Jeff Ross
Directed by Stephen Kessler