In person, David Baddiel, disarmingly dishevelled, with large and thickish glasses, looks much like the stereotypical British comedian.
But to portray him as an innocuous comic would be a disservice and utterly incorrect. His memoir My Family made me laugh, and cry, and laugh again. His documentary film Confronting Holocaust Denial infuriated me. His monograph Jews Don’t Count made me re-evaluate much. His soccer supporters’ anthem Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home), written to coincide with the 1996 European Championship, makes me sing along even today, and the music video remains funny. I haven’t yet read his novels, but one, The Death of Eli Gold, was on the London Times’s 2011 list of best books, and he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
At one point in our interview I drop my notes and admit I don’t know how to describe what he does. “Storyteller,” he responds.
Baddiel was recently in South Africa for the Jewish Literary Festival, taking centre stage on various current, important issues involving Jewish ethnicity and identity.
His visit has prompted renewed publicity for his books, particularly My Family, released last year, and Jews Don’t Count, which may be described as a polemic. These two books alone make for an intriguing, topical conversation.
Jews Don’t Count is a provocative and often scathing observation of progressive people’s attitude to antisemitism, which Baddiel believes is often confused, clouded in cognitive dissonance, or outright hypocritical. Though perspectives and examples predominantly relate to Britain’s sociopolitics, and occasionally that of the US, he positions his argument as holding true universally.
Racism now involves a hierarchy, and antisemitism is viewed as less important. Jews “have a flickering whiteness”, in that they are deemed privileged and wealthy — a high status undeserving of concern or support — but continue to be othered with low status, he writes.
Yet Jews aren’t particularly rich, at least not in all societies. In the US, Hindus are the wealthiest ethnic group, for example. Of all millionaires worldwide, only 1.7% are Jewish, while 6.5% are Muslim. Yet tropes persist that make many Jews feel shame at their comparative comfortableness.
Baddiel’s point about wealth is that it is no protection against racism, hatred and genocide, as millions of European Jews experienced just three generations ago. “Fuck off about money,” he writes. “It doesn’t matter how rich you are, because the racists will smash in the door of your big house that they know you don’t deserve anyway and only own because you are Jews.”
His insights on the safety of Jews around the world are enlightening, and concerning. Days before his appearance at the 2023 São Paulo Jewish Literary Festival, three separate terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions in the city were thwarted. Neo-Nazi revisionism is rife online, and Holocaust denialism is growing. He interviewed an Irish denier as part of a recent BBC documentary, Confronting Holocaust Denial. “‘Jews control the BBC,’ he said to me at one point, and I said: ‘If Jews controlled the BBC, I’d be on it more,’” Baddiel recalls, saying that humour is the only way to highlight the ridiculousness of these kinds of views. Engaging with these arguments is impossible, “because they cannot be engaged with”.
Meanwhile, in the UK, he notes, “every Jewish school does gun-attack drills”.
I don’t need to ask him about the situation in Gaza. “It’s awful, tragic, and much on my mind,” Baddiel says, “and I’m a non-Zionist. But the antisemitism discussion should not constantly be reduced to Israel.” Whataboutism is no excuse for any form of racism: “When people say, ‘What about the situation for Palestinians?’, does that mean that if Jews are intimidated by [extremist] views and threats, that should be expected?” Besides, as he notes in Jews Don’t Count, people of Jewish ethnicity living in other parts of the world have literally nothing to do with Israel.
We shift into discussing some of his TV appearances, and I mention one for Sky in which he was interviewed for Holocaust Memorial Day. “My hair was terrible for that,” he says. “I sent a picture of it to my family so they could have a laugh — could they believe I was on TV for Holocaust Memorial Day with my hair like this!”
I suggest to him that Jews Don’t Count, its documentary spin-off and his television commentary and analyses make him an activist. “That pisses me off. Obviously Jews Don’t Count has been used to shift the dial on antisemitism, and I’m happy about that. But it’s not a manifesto, not a call to action. It’s a call to thought.” So, is he a philosopher then? “Yeah, I kind of am,” he replies, “I think the relationship between stand-up comedy and philosophy is very close.”
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This rings true in My Family. The memoir has numerous echoes from Jews Don’t Count, such as when Baddiel remembers, at his Orthodox Jewish primary school, a teacher matter-of-factly telling the class, “There’ll always be someone who doesn’t like Jews,” which was, Baddiel writes, “a terrible thing to tell 11-year-old children; and, of course, he was absolutely right”.
It is simultaneously riotously funny and acutely poignant, and carries numerous observations regarding what comprises a meaningful life.
Written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness, with occasional subheadings rather than chapter breaks, it is littered with footnotes — part of his comic style, the constant interruption of one story to observe upon something else, creating multiple lines of humour. Still, it’s jumpy to read, and I tell Baddiel that it’s my one issue with the book. He points out in reply that many of my questions and comments are directly from footnotes, so they have worked. Touché.
His mother, Sarah, was an extraordinarily complicated woman, impacted by a struggle for identity and the intergenerational trauma of her parents having escaped from Germany in the nick of time. Her father had already spent a year in a concentration camp; wartime refuge in England involved being interred as an enemy national.
Meanwhile, his father, Colin, found life one giant aggravation. A few things soothed him: chemistry, his toy memorabilia collection, football. But his relationship with his wife was governed by waves of annoyance at her constant meshugarses; Baddiel uses the Yiddish word to convey “exasperation” at her “batshit” behaviours. What Colin seemed to want was to be left largely alone. Unsurprisingly, for Baddiel and his brothers, fatherly affection was absent.
As such, much of the backdrop to Baddiel’s family life is sad, even heartbreaking — but also makes perfect material for jokes. A standout story concerns his mother’s affair, conducted in plain sight. Bizarrely, immersed in his own world, his father was oblivious.
Years later Baddiel has his own live TV comedy show, Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, and his mother makes a guest appearance; she banters with him by suggesting that he and one of his brothers may not have the same father. His father is in the studio audience. “Hang on a sec. Mother,” Baddiel responds, “that’s calling yourself a slag.” To which she says: “No, it’s not. It’s suggesting I had a good life.”
The episode, says Baddiel, “inspires in me now, as much does as I get older and think about my flawed, damaged parents, a reflex jolt of sympathy”.
The book celebrates the flaws in people, their fullness, what makes them human. Cracks, as Leonard Cohen sang, are where the light gets in. In that sense, his memoir’s epigraph, attributed to fellow comedian Julian Barratt, is beautiful: “To take the piss out of something you have to love it.”
Mainly, I find Baddiel, in his own complexity, to be a deep, humanist thinker. But I can’t resist talking to him for a few minutes about football. I start humming the song he co-wrote in 1996, prompting him to reflect: “Three Lions is the most successful thing I’ve ever done. People say the best day of your life is when your children are born. Fuck that, the best day of my life was when fans starting spontaneously singing my song after the England-Scotland game in Euro96.”
I’m fairly certain his smile indicates this is Baddiel the comedian talking.
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