Kevin Hart once roasted Jeff Ross so hard that he inadvertently saved the comedian’s life.
“He knew. He saved my life,” Ross, 60, told Obsessed: The Podcast about the comedian’s off-hand remark that led to his life-saving diagnosis.
Hart, 46, who was the roastmaster for Netflix’s The Roast of Tom Brady in 2024, told Ross that he “looked sick.”
“I don’t know what it is, but you look sick,” Hart quipped.
Three weeks later, Ross was diagnosed with colon cancer.
“He saved my life, because I went and got checked out, and I did, I had colon cancer,” Ross explained. “By the way, I felt great, I didn’t know I had colon cancer. I just went in for a colonoscopy.”
Ross, who admits he “waited probably 10 years too long” to get the procedure, finally went after his friend, Dr. Jordan Rubin, had pestered his friend group to go.
In the limited time between putting on one of the most-watched live events in Netflix history and embarking on an eight-week Broadway run of his retrospective comedy show, Take A Banana for the Ride, Ross got a full-body checkup.
“So finally, the roast was over. I kind of finished this intense period of work, and I had a little break before ramping up the one-man show again. So I was like, let me go to the dentist. Let me go to the shrink. Let me get a colonoscopy,” he said. “And boom, there it was. There was a frickin’ tumor in there.”
Ross hadn’t originally planned to tell anyone except his inner circle, let alone make it a focal point of his Broadway debut.
“I told friends, but I didn’t tell my fans, and I didn’t know if I’d put it in the show. I thought it’d be too depressing,” he said.
“But I had a profound experience towards the end of the whole thing, where I went in for a follow-up colonoscopy a year later,” he continued. “And I started crying at this routine procedure because if the result was good, I could go to New York and do my show on Broadway. If it was bad, I might die, I might have more chemo, I might need more surgery. It was a lot at stake.”
Ross recalled “sniveling” and “crying” with the nurse, after realizing “how lucky he was.” It was in that moment, when he came to terms with the fact that “whatever happens, happens,” that he realized he needed to put his illness in his show.
“I realized how lucky I was. And if other people could start to understand how lucky they could be, or are, and the little tricks that I did in my head to help me find that positive attitude,” he said, noting that “acceptance” got him to where he is now: cancer-free.
“I’m 100 percent, baby,” Ross concluded. “The port came out a couple of weeks ago, I got a scar, and I’m on the other side of this. So anybody who’s in it right now, who’s hearing this, you can do it. You really can.”
Take A Banana for the Ride is available to stream on Netflix.
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