Devoted to funny

My Family: The Memoir ★★★★★ 

David Baddiel
4th Estate

“This is a story about life and death and transgression — and that’s a good thing to celebrate.”

This is what English author, comedian, screenwriter, television presenter and Jewish-atheist David Baddiel says of his memoir, My Family.

His mother’s traumatic childhood, shaped by fleeing Nazi Germany to escape extermination, and his father's descent into dementia, is empathetically — and amusingly — explored alongside the absurdities of life. 

His mum, Sarah, was a complex woman with a penchant for penning erotic poetry, who had a midlife affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman (“tee” for “transgression” indeed!). She was also a compulsive hoarder, which Baddiel ascribes to a childhood where everything was taken from her.

“She was proud of her affair,” Baddiel says, “proud of her golfing memorabilia and proud of her transgressions.” He believes she wouldn’t have liked every intricate detail he shared about her sen/sex-sational life, but adds that she would’ve “sort of loved it”.

The funny man’s default mode to approaching hardship in life is via humour — yet never mockery — saying “the only time that the book is not comic is when my mum dies. It was incredibly shocking and horrible.”

Her search for a life she never had is both tragic and comic — and “you have to celebrate it; the sadness is part of what’s amazing.”

Antonymous to Sarah is his father, Colin, a working-class Welshman and distinguished scientist, who was laid off mid-career and ended up selling Dinky toys. Described by Baddiel as “incredibly male”, “emotionally distant” and “fucked-off”, he was never violent towards Baddiel and his brothers, Ivor and Dan, but unpredictable in his behaviour: “We were all frightened of him. We all thought he was going to start shouting at any moment.”

Baddiel recounts the day he told his dad he was going to pursue a future in literature, not science, which was met with much chagrin — “it's such an example of his type of 1970s shit parenting” — yet describes this act of defiance as “quite brave” of him.

Familial Sturm und Drang aside, Baddiel’s memoir refrains from bitterness.

“I could’ve written it as an angry, misery memoir,” he admits. “But whatever damage my parents did accidentally ... it’s kind of good. I like who I am and I’m comfortable in my own skin.

“And that’s what makes this book different from, say, Spare by Prince Harry. The minute you start thinking, ‘Yeah, but it’s funny’, the rage starts to dissipate.” (Neither does it feature a number of references to his “todger”, but there’s parental schtupping a-plenty...)

Inversely to an ostensibly male aversion to seeking help for mental health, Baddiel devotes a number of pages to his therapy sessions (“I really love my therapist!”). 

Would he describe himself as a highly-therapised individual? 

“I am, but I’ll be honest with you. I’m not absolutely sure I need therapy. What I think I needed, is time and space to process this mad life that I had. I was pretty depressed in my 30s, which was definitely related to my childhood, but I mainly needed space to process it.”

The mad life didn’t reach its conclusion when adulthood approached, with sudden fame adding to the bewilderment. As Baddiel became “crazily well-known in Britain”, with sell-out stand-up gigs, “dealing with all that at the same time as never having dealt with all this childhood stuff ... And obviously, therapy helped.

“But I think the main thing that sorted me out was my own sense of comedy and having children. Because I think that you can spend too much time ruminating on your own stuff. And the thing that makes you not do that, makes me not do that, was having children. It was the first time that I didn’t spend a lot of time processing my own stuff.” 

The memoir grapples with the fallibility of memory, especially as his father develops dementia — “The subplot is really my dad’s memory loss.” — and as someone “obsessed with the truth”, Baddiel’s pursuit of accuracy is tangible, while acknowledging its relativity. 

“That’s why I’m an atheist. Even though I’m not a scientist, I believe in the objective truth of science. I need you to believe that this is objective truth about my parents, which is why there’s lots of pictures in the book, and lots of archives, and lots of emails, because I can’t have you thinking that this is just my version.” 

Baddiel even includes a screenshot of a saucy email Sarah sent her lover: “Although the sexiness involves telling him that she’s got leukaemia and Crohn’s disease, that somehow or other is still a sexy message,” he laughs. “She cc’d it to me and my brother, and you need to see that.”

His commitment to truth informs everything Baddiel writes, including his 2021 title, Jews Don’t Count: How Identity Politics Failed One Particular Identity. “I got a strong sense there were lots of Jews who had spent their lives not telling people they were Jewish, they were of frightened of it and ashamed of it.”

His commitment to truth-telling knows no age-constraint either, as he often addresses a more, ahem, mature reading audience. “Well, that’s slightly self-deprecating in its own way, in that I am so obsessed with the truth, and one of the things about me is I am quite old. I am 60, and so I won’t shy away from that either. I’d rather own it and find the comedy in it.”

Yet there’s far less shame attached to men ageing than women...

“That’s definitely true. But our culture in general is incredibly ageist.”

He’s now writing a third essay book about maleness and heterosexual male desire. “It’s a really difficult thing to talk about but I’m interested in whether I can talk about difficult things. But one of the things I’m aware of while writing it is: I’m old. And if you’re an old man talking about sexual desire, you’re considered creepy. Isn’t that ageist too?”

His candour extends to his perception of fame: “You should own the fact that you’re famous. Fame has got these hilarious absurdities to it.” Being propelled into — and scrutinised by — the public didn’t change who he is, he adds. “From a very early age, I was absolutely certain of who I was, and very comfortable in my own skin, and I never shifted that at all,” regardless of “another version of you” that is connected to fame.

Twitter (now X), once exciting, now exasperates and exhausts him. “It’s not a marketplace of ideas, it’s a marketplace of identity. And identity on social media is built in opposition: ‘I’m this, so I hate that.’ That created a sea of rage and toxicity.” He’s stepped back from social media for the sake of his mental health, describing online shouting matches as “a waste of fucking time”.

Conversely, a whole chapter is dedicated to a meme-favourite-social-media-mammal: cats. A fundamental atheist, Baddiel writes that “when I look at my cats ... curving like a Matisse in a shaft of sunlight, I believe in God”, comparing the beauty found in felines to the work of John Updike: “He was a believer, but when he talks about God, he doesn’t always mean God. He means a sense of beauty in the world.”

He also likens pets to depictions of family structures: “The only time my dad showed straightforward affection, was towards the cat.” There’s a tender moment in the book where a young Baddiel leans on his dad’s shoulder, only to have him respond, “Oh, I didn’t know you cared”, in a slightly camp voice, insinuating that Baddiel’s gesture makes him gay. It gets a laugh during readings, but Baddiel doesn’t see it as comic. “It put me off physical contact with my dad forever. So much so that when he was dying, I didn’t hold his hand in case he woke up and said, ‘Oh, hello sailor’. I'm making it funny but I remember being very deflated.”

After her death, a number of people describe his mum as “wonderful”, which Baddiel regards as a disservice. He writes: To really preserve their memory — to be true to them, as I understand the truth — you must call up their weirdness, their madness, their flaws. Because the dead, despite what we might like to think, are not angels.

How would he like to be remembered after shuffling off this mortal coil? 

“That’s a really good question. I’m going to say ‘honest’, but honest is kind of an annoying word.” He pauses. “‘Devoted to funny’. I wouldn’t say ‘funny’ because funny is too much of a boast, but devoted to funny is OK,” he smiles.

L(augh)’chaim!