Baddiel: humour is my anti-semitism antidote
David Baddiel tells Luke Mintz he will continue to tackle the rise in ‘new anti-semitism’ the only way he knows how – with humour
Comedian David Baddiel has said he fears anti-semitism has become “much more of a thing now” in Britain. He said: “I certainly think there’s a lot of very mad, extreme politics around. And, as ever, when there are mad politics, it seems to involve Jewhatred.” He finds it “heartbreaking” but thinks it is his job to tackle the issue head-on, with humour.
When David Baddiel was 11, he asked his grandmother, Oti, how many siblings she had. “You’d have to ask Mr Hitler about that,” she replied, a reference to her escape from Nazi Germany as a Jewish refugee in 1939.
“At the time I thought, ‘Mr Hitler – that’s the song on Dad’s Army,’ ” Baddiel remembers.
It was a time of optimism, he says, when the remains of post-war antisemitism seemed to be ebbing away. But the rise of what he calls a “new anti-semitism” has loomed large in Baddiel’s mind over the last few years, he explains from the restaurant of a central London hotel between rehearsals for his latest play, God’s
Dice, which is on at the Soho Theatre until the end of the month.
The 55-year-old comic, who was known in the Nineties as one half of Baddiel and Skinner, and later became a successful children’s novelist and stand-up comedian, remembers boys shouting racist abuse outside his Orthodox Jewish primary school in north London when he was a child. But he thinks Jew-hatred has become “much more of a thing now”; recently, at a talk he gave to a Jewish primary school, he was shocked to find a “proper high-level security procedure” on the way in.
“When I was young I thought, ‘Well, the Holocaust is over, society is generally progressing in the right way, that’s never going to happen again.’ And now, I don’t think the Holocaust like it happened then is going to happen again, but I certainly think there’s a lot of very mad, extreme politics around. And, as ever, when there are mad politics, it seems to involve Jew-hatred.”
He finds it all “heartbreaking” but, as a comedian, Baddiel thinks it is his job to tackle the issue head-on, with humour. Indeed, he recently filmed a BBC documentary about Holocaust denial in which he met a fully fledged denier, and Baddiel admits he couldn’t resist making a few jokes at his interviewee’s expense.
“Quite quickly, I start making fun of him, because I think that’s the only thing I can do. I don’t want to take his arguments seriously because… his arguments are f------ ludicrous. How are you meant to deal with ludicrousness? You make fun of it.”
Disturbingly, one in 20 Britons does not believe the Holocaust took place, according to a poll taken earlier this year, and the topic is of particular poignance for Baddiel because of his mother, Sarah, who was brought to Britain from Germany as a five-month-old Jewish refugee in 1939 after her father, Ernst, had been stripped of his assets by the Nazis. Baddiel has always harboured a “dark fascination” for Holocaust denial, but never managed to speak to his mother about it before her death in 2014.
“When I was young, although it was around,
I don’t think it was a thing we would have discussed, and latterly my mum had so much on her plate with my dad’s dementia… It just feels like a weird conversation to have.”
The father he refers to is Colin, who suffers from a form of frontal lobe dementia known as Pick’s disease. In 2016, Colin was the subject of Baddiel’s popular one-man show,
My Family: Not the Sitcom, which looked at the funnier aspects of his father’s condition. Subject to abrupt mood changes, Colin’s rudeness and aggression meant he was eventually banned from his Jewish day care home, and he even caused an awkward moment at his wife’s shiva (mourning ceremony). But now, Baddiel says, the comedy has mostly dried up.
“One of the things I was trying to do in that show was to redraw how we think of dementia, so it’s not just this idea of someone with a blanket over their legs staring at the wall. It takes many forms, and it can take very active, crazy forms. At that time, his Pick’s disease was extremely disinhibited, loud, like a bull in a china shop. He’s now quieter, his short-term memories are almost completely gone, he only just about knows who I am.
“I think he knows that I’m someone familiar, because he kind of smiles at me, but I think he’d be hard pushed to say what my name was. He’ll know when I say it. So really he’s become more like a person we classically understand as having dementia.”
A former Labour voter, Baddiel seems particularly disturbed by the rise of what historian Deborah Lipstadt has called “soft-core denial” in the Labour Party. He says Jews are at risk of being written out of Holocaust history due to a “woke” belief that “the extermination of Jews in the Forties has had too much spotlight thrown on it”, pointing to a recent fringe Labour meeting about the Holocaust in which Jews did not receive a single mention.
“I probably won’t vote Labour in the next election. I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-semite, I think that’s not complicated enough. But the discourse of the Left has swung towards a type of anti-semitism which is relatively unconscious – a lot of them won’t even realise it’s anti-semitic.”
On top of his theatre career, Baddiel has also written several popular children’s novels. His latest, The Taylor Turbochaser, follows an 11-year-old petrolhead who transforms her electric wheelchair into a supercar. Only one of last year’s bestselling 100 children’s books featured a central character with a disability, according to Nielsen book data, and Baddiel has won praise for putting a girl in a wheelchair at the novel’s front and centre. That said, he was keen that the book did not become solely about disability, and he admits he was nervous about broaching the topic at first. “I’m not disabled, so one of the things I was worried about is the weird situation in which we live, where any form of writing about something that’s not you can be accused of appropriation. But I thought, ‘I won’t worry about that’. And as it happens, the response from disabled people has been really brilliant.
“I would only ever write something including a disabled child if I felt it was organic to the story to do so. I base all my stories in what I consider to be the real world, and the idea of having a sanitised world without those things in it is artistically mad.”
Baddiel’s warts-and-all comic style will play a central part in his forthcoming one-man show, Trolls:
Not the Dolls, in which he will explain why he spends large amounts of time arguing with his online tormentors in front of his 626,000 braying Twitter followers. Like many men of his age, he admits he is “addicted” to his smartphone – “Just now, I was trying to watch a technical rehearsal and, partly because the technical rehearsal is kind of boring, I found myself on Twitter” – and much of his screen-time is spent taking the mickey out of far-right trolls.
He certainly doesn’t agree with the “Don’t Feed the Trolls” campaign launched recently by Gary Lineker and Rachel Riley, which encourages celebrities and politicians to ignore online abuse.
“I come from a stand-up comic tradition, which says they are hecklers, whether it’s people straightforwardly abusing me, or morally reprimanding me, or being racist. Lots of those people have a very grandiose sense of self, so if you mock them in the right way, in a way that is kind of disarming, then I think their whole thing crumbles. As a comedian, my job is not to ignore them, but to make fun of them.”
The Taylor Turbochaser by David Baddiel (Harper Collins, £12.99) is out now. Buy yours for £10.99 at books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
‘How are you meant to deal with ludicrousness? You make fun of it’
‘Dad smiles at me, but I think he’d be hard pushed to say what my name was’