David Baddiel: ‘I am going to talk about difficult stuff’

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/may/09/david-baddiel-i-am-going-to-talk-about-difficult-stuff

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“Can you give me just one moment?” asks David Baddiel, who, when we sit down for a coffee in his local Starbucks, is still frantically typing on his phone. “I’m so sorry but I’m just tweeting something very immature.” As it turns out, he’s not wrong. The comedian turns his phone around to show me the photo he’s just taken, of a sign in the bathroom, which has made him giggle because it uses the word toilet twice in a sentence of just eight words. He gives me a wry smile. “Yes, I realise I am a 50-year-old man.”

Later he will lament the culture of easy outrage that social platforms such as Twitter have spawned, but for now he’s happy to watch the retweets and lavatory-related replies roll in.

It is an interesting window on his world, which seems effortlessly to sway between the silly and the serious. Certainly, the politely chatty man who sits opposite me sipping a cappuccino in Hampstead, having just done the morning school run, is a very different Baddiel to the star of lad comedies such as the Fantasy Football League TV show of two decades ago. Back then, porn and the burden of monogamy were common topics. Today we chat about the mock election being held at his son’s primary school, the nuisances of postal voting and a history documentary he is about to film across Asia. So far, so mellow.

But it’s when Baddiel begins to discuss his new standup show (still a work in progress, he is keen to point out) that things get more interesting. For a start, he has selected two of the most unlikely topics as subject-matter – the sudden death of his mother in December, and his father’s continuing battle with Pick’s disease, a severe form of dementia. It is, he acknowledges, his most “dark and complicated” standup comedy yet, requiring him to dredge up decades-old memories of family dysfunction at something of a personal cost.

“It’s a glib thing to say, but if comedy is therapy, then this really is that,” he says. “It’s incredibly close to me, the most personal of all of my comedy. I am going to talk about difficult stuff – sex and dementia and death – and it is by far the most difficult thing I’ve ever written.”

Born in 1964, Baddiel grew up in Willesden, north London, as the middle of three brothers, and openly describes his relationship with his parents as “complicated” (he once claimed his mother openly favoured his younger brother). His mother, a German Jew who escaped from Nazi Germany as a very young child, was “almost too individual”, with an obsessive habit of collecting golf memorabilia, while his father was an “unbelievably aggressive, rude bloke”. Their marriage was very unhappy, filled with fracture and argument. They separated and got back together during Baddiel’s childhood, which he looks back on with a degree of bitterness.

“In between being born in Nazi Germany, and marriage to my dad – of which I think marriage to my dad might have been worse – my mother had a very difficult and complicated life,” he says.

While he is hardly the first to use a messed-up family life as the basis of standup material, Baddiel admits some parts venture into “really, really black comedy”. His mother’s lengthy affair when they were growing up, for example, and the sexually inappropriate things his father now says, thanks to the heartless grip of dementia.

I was initially sceptical about the comedic worth of dementia, even if it is based on his own father, but as I listened to Baddiel recount various anecdotes I have to confess I did laugh.

“My dad has a particular type of dementia where symptoms include sexual disinhibition, incredible amounts if swearing and irritability,” he tells me. “And over the course of my mum’s death, he said some unbelievably inappropriate things to all the women at the shivas. We were at a shiva for my mum’s death and he was there, an 80-year-old-man, asking to fuck all the women there. And I use the word ‘fuck’ because that was the tamest of the words he would use. Really graphic.”

There is even something funny to be found, Baddiel adds, in the terrible agony of having to repeatedly tell his father that their mother has died because his ability to recall such information is completely gone.

Telling these stories is clearly the comedian’s own method of mourning, what he calls his coping process (“process is a shit word, but you know what I mean”). But does he not feel uncomfortable about drawing laughs from a tragedy so close to home?

“As long as I’m all right with it, and my brothers are all right with it, then anyone who says I shouldn’t do this can fuck off as far as I’m concerned,” says Baddiel. “My point is that it is offensive, but I can own that offensiveness and talk about it and make it funny, because he’s my dad.”

Even so, some experiences are not material even for the darkest comedy. Describing the experience of being in hospital with his mother as doctors tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate her, he visibly deflates, though takes me through the events with a determined matter-of-factness.

“My mum’s death was appalling,” he says. “It opened my eyes to something I hadn’t really thought about before. When you get older, you are told constantly that you should be there for your parents’ deaths, otherwise you will regret it. But what we are not prepared for is a sudden, brutal death that you are there for, with medical people shouting and things bleeping and your parent gasping for breath.”

He pauses. “To be there for that is complicated, because there is a part of you that thinks, ‘I don’t know if I should be here. I’m impotent in this situation and I can feel the damage happening.’ It was incredibly awful for me and my older brother. I don’t talk about this in the show, not because I couldn’t, but because I don’t think there actually is any comedy here.”

It is fair to say Baddiel has never been one to steer clear of the uncomfortable. His 2010 film, The Infidel, which he successfully adapted into a stage musical last year, was based on the sticky premise of a British Muslim who discovers he is adopted and was in fact born Jewish (the musical looks likely to transfer to the West End in the autumn). Two years ago, he also threw himself into the middle of the debate on racism in football, spearheading a campaign to stop fans using the word “yid” – a derogatory term for Jew – in football anthems sung in grounds across the country. It sparked a nationwide debate and a denunciation of the word by the FA but also a remarkable encounter.

Amid that furore, as he stood waiting in the wings of an ITV studio, about to make an appearance on the topical show The Agenda, Baddiel was accosted by David Cameron. The prime minister was also due to be a guest on the programme, but clearly wanted to get something off his chest before the pair went on air.

“‘Are we going to talk about the yid thing?” Cameron asked the comedian in mild panic, having been quoted days before stating that Spurs football fans who chanted the word at football games should not be prosecuted. “Because if we do, you’re right and I’m wrong. I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve spoken to Lord Feldman and actually he told me: ‘Baddiel’s right about this.’ So you’re right, it’s a horrible word.”

As it turned out, the topic never came up, and Cameron’s frantic backpedalling went unchallenged. But for Baddiel it is an incident that has stuck with him as a stark indictment of how antisemitism is perceived in the UK.

“The yid thing,” he repeats, rolling his eyes as he recalls the brief exchange. “It’s pretty extraordinary really. Can you imagine David Cameron using any other derogatory racial term in that way?”

He may describe himself as a fundamentalist atheist, but in Baddiel’s own words he “loves being Jewish” and believes as a nation we have a tendency to sweep antisemitism under the carpet.

“With the Kick It Out campaign, I was interested in asking: ‘Why is antisemitism a lesser racism than other racisms?’” he says. “I genuinely believe that to be the case – that negative stuff said against Jews isn’t considered that important. And the reason is because ordinary people still believe Jews are rich and powerful and therefore not in need of any protection – which in itself is a very racist idea. My feeling is that Jews have never been allowed the protections that antiracism offers other oppressed minorities because they are not thought of as an oppressed minority, even by the left.”

He sighs with exasperation as he cites the British press and the public’s response to Ed Miliband, the child of Jewish refugees, as a prime example of this. Constantly referred to as the “North London Ed Miliband” (“everyone knows that’s just another word for Jewish”), Baddiel points to the construction of the Labour leader as this nerdy, alien outsider who can’t eat a bacon sandwich.

“Definitely the more extreme narrative of Ed Miliband as ‘not quite one of us’ is all to do with the fact he is Jewish, there is no question about it,” says Baddiel. “The word ‘alien’ comes up all the time, when, of course, he isn’t alien at all.”

But with the controversial actions of Israel and rising antisemitism across Europe, has being Jewish in Britain become more difficult?

He thinks for a second, then shakes his head. “You know, for me, I wouldn’t say much has changed. I’ve always been very out about being Jewish, which a lot of people in this country simply are not. As a result, it’s always brought me a certain amount of bad reaction and criticism, and continues to do so.”

While we are on the topic of racism and hate speech, I say, what are your thoughts on PEN’s decision to award the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with the Freedom of Expression Courage award? Is it right to celebrate material that is perceived by many as anti-Islamic and racist?

Baddiel is firm in his answer. “I’m completely behind PEN with this one,” he says. “First of all, it is an award honouring Charlie Hebdo’s refusal to be cowed in the face of terror, and I think that is worth honouring. Secondly, I also don’t believe Charlie Hebdo’s satire was racist. One key point is that the people at Charlie Hebdo were not being shot by those gunmen because they were Islamaphobic – they were being shot because they were blasphemous. That is a fundamental difference.”

Baddiel is about to leave, but I have a final question. As a longtime friend of comedian turned pied piper Russell Brand, is he all aboard the Brand revolution train?

He guffaws loudly. “Ah, Russell is a self-avowed narcissist,” he says, not nastily, but with tenderness in his voice.

“No, I’m not really a supporter of his revolution and he knows that. I don’t like anything that moves into the territory of conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories are how idiots get to feel like intellectuals. Russell is not a conspiracy theorist, but some of what he says points there, and he has been friendly with David Icke, which is not good. And without wishing to come back to it, one of the things that always happens with conspiracy theories is that someone eventually says, ‘and of course, the Jews’.”

It’s only later, on the train home, that I think to check how his photo is going down on Twitter, and I’m impressed – 56 retweets and more than 150 people have favourited it. It seems Baddiel is right. When it comes to toilet humour, most of us are still giggling five-year-olds at heart.

• A Preview of David Baddiel’s My Family: Not the Sitcom will be at Soho theatre, 3-6 June. Details: sohotheatre.com

• This article was amended on 9 May 2015 to correct the spelling of backpedalling, and on 14 May 2015 to correct the spelling of indictment.