NEW YORK (AP) — Jeff Ross, a comedian known for hosting brutal roasts of celebrities, is coming to Broadway this summer with a one-man autobiographical show that will offer fans a softer, more intimate side.
“The hard part for me is letting go of a bit of my armor — of my roastmaster persona — and letting the audience get to me so that I can then get them,” he tells The Associated Press ahead of a formal announcement Wednesday. “I think it’s healthy to change it up and surprise people.”
“Jeff Ross: Take a Banana for the Ride” will play the Nederlander Theatre starting Aug. 5 for an eight-week engagement through Sept. 29.
The show will explore Ross’ close relatives, especially his grandfather on his mother’s side — Ross calls him “the hero of my childhood” — who stepped up after the comedian’s parents died when he was a teenager.
“It’s very autobiographical, but it’s also not really about just me. It’s about all of us. When I talk about my uncle or my mom, I want you to see your uncle and your mom in the stories. That’s really important to me,” Ross says.
“It’s very joyful. It kind of takes the stigma out of loss and sickness and lets people know that they’re going to be OK no matter what happens.”
The title comes from the days when Ross was living with his grandfather in New Jersey. The younger man would take his grandfather to doctor visits or visit him in the hospital during the day and at night go into New York for open-mic nights.
“My grandfather would always give me money for the bus and a banana, and he’d say, ‘Take a banana for the ride.’ I reluctantly took it, and more often than not, I’d be stuck in traffic, or I’d get low blood sugar, and that banana would be a lifesaver,” says Ross.
“But it was really his way of saying, ‘Be ready for anything’ and also, ‘I can’t go with you but I’m there with you in spirit.’ So it was an emotional thing, it was a practical thing. It’s something that I still do.”
Ross is known as “The Roastmaster General” for his incendiary takedowns of Justin Bieber, Rob Lowe, Alec Baldwin and Tom Brady, among many others.
The seeds for “Jeff Ross: Take a Banana for the Ride” were planted in the mid-1990s when Ross gathered jokes and stories about his grandfather for an hourlong set. But digging up the past proved too much.
“I couldn’t sustain it emotionally. It was just too much for me as a 30-year-old guy,” Ross says. “But now, 30 years later, I can dig in and look back and add a layer of experience over it all.”
He was spurred on in large part to losing three comedic friends — Bob Saget, Gilbert Gottfried and Norm Macdonald — within eight months. “That motivated me to look back at the old show from decades earlier and rewrite it completely for my current brain and my current skill set.”
Ross will be the latest comedian to come to Broadway, following John Mulaney, Mike Birbiglia, Alex Edelman, Amy Schumer, Keegan-Michael Key, Rachel Dratch, Billy Crystal and Colin Quinn. Bill Burr made his Broadway debut this year in a revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
Ross reaches back even further. His aunt took him to see Jackie Mason’s “The World According to Me!” in the 1980s, and the young comedian was floored by the comedian’s captivating set.
“It was elegant, but it was also punk rock because he was being bawdy and naughty and hilarious and saying taboo things and it really, really stayed with me for a long, long time.”
