Take A Banana For The Ride

Jeff Ross is best known for eviscerating celebrities on live television, but here he walks onto a Broadway stage in a banana-yellow suit to talk about his dead relatives. His one-man show is less a conventional stand-up set and more an intimate, tragicomic memoir. He processes decades of grief by telling jokes about his mother’s death, his father’s drug addiction, and the passing of close friends like Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget, and Norm Macdonald. It is a strange, sentimental pivot for a comic who usually trades in mean-spirited barbs.\n\nFilmed during an eight-week run at the Nederlander Theatre in New York and released on Netflix in March 2026, the 90-minute show takes its name from a phrase Ross’s grandfather used to tell him. Along with family tragedy, Ross shares his own health struggles, detailing his recent colon cancer treatment, a birth defect that required surgery, and his alopecia. To break up the heavy anecdotes, he leads the crowd in a rhymed song warning people not to mess with Jewish people, shares a story about owning a German rescue dog, and closes the night by inviting audience members to share their own struggles.\n\nThe production divided theater critics and stand-up fans. While many appreciated the vulnerability of seeing the Roastmaster General drop his guard, others felt the show suffered from an identity crisis, bouncing awkwardly between crude punchlines and intense sentimentality. Ross’s speak-singing is notoriously rough, but the performance works best as a cathartic exercise in laughing through profound personal pain.