David Baddiel is Jewish. His grandparents fled the Nazis in 1939 but lost people they loved to the gas chambers. So it’s no wonder he felt disgust at having to shake the hand of a man who insists the murder of millions of people never happened. ‘I wanted to be very upfront about how much I didn’t want to meet a Holocaust denier,’ says the writer and comedian, who accepted the greeting in order to film an interview for a new BBC documentary but was visibly disturbed. ‘There were a lot of emotions in meeting him. I was very angry at bits of that interview and very exhausted after talking to him for a long time, three hours or more, with him saying unbelievably offensive things. I was like: “What the f*** am I doing here?”’
Confronting Holocaust Denial With David Baddiel takes him to the former death camps and to meet a survivor, but it also puts him face to face with one of the rising number of people who say – despite all the evidence – that the Holocaust is a hoax
The answer is that this witty, versatile man who has been making us laugh and think for 30 years with his stand-up, radio and television shows has now made a powerful and timely film. Confronting Holocaust Denial With David Baddiel takes him to the former death camps and to meet a survivor, but it also puts him face to face with one of the rising number of people who say – despite all the evidence – that the Holocaust is a hoax.
The man he met in Ireland has 7,000 followers on Facebook. Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, history is being forgotten or distorted and a new generation of online activists are posting anti-semitic images and slogans along with fake facts and theories full of lies about the Holocaust. Their popularity has been boosted by the rise of far-Right ideas across the world.
These people have some pretty extreme followers, don’t they? ‘Oh yes. I know that now. I have had various chats with security people about it all. This programme will certainly lead to a lot of online abuse. One can only hope it will not lead to anyone actually threatening me in real life,’ says Baddiel. ‘The programme is an exploratory essay about where we are, it doesn’t offer actual answers. What can I say? I very much hope that no one kills me as a result of it.’
He laughs, but sounds nervous. Is he taking the danger seriously? ‘Yeah. Someone was killed. It’s in the programme. A security guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington was killed by an 88-year-old man. The guard was trying to help him inside, but then the old man just shot him. He was a Holocaust denier. It’s so extraordinary. He was so furious that there was a museum to the Holocaust.’
Still, Baddiel is not about to back down. ‘I am someone who is going to say what I want to say. I am very privileged to have a platform. Everyone is frightened on Twitter of being told that they’ve got it wrong. That is a different type of fear to this, which is: are you going to be killed by a lunatic? I take it seriously. It is in the mix of my fears, but so far I have not let it stop me saying stuff.’
Baddiel has an unusual, one-word profile on Twitter that just says: ‘Jew’. He has 647,000 followers and is both witty and outspoken, sometimes breathtakingly so
Baddiel’s comedy has always been thought-provoking, even when he was being daft alongside Rob Newman and then Frank Skinner in the Nineties. Lately he has written some hugely popular children’s books, including The Parent Agency and Birthday Boy, as well as the hit film The Infidel starring Omid Djalili and Miranda Hart. But his work took a more personal, reflective turn with My Family: Not The Sitcom, a live show exploring his own history and his father Colin’s slide into dementia. And now comes a very funny new live show called Trolls: Not The Dolls, which turns the online abuse he gets into comedy and this documentary, at a time when statistics show anti-semitic abuse is on the rise in Britain.
Baddiel, 55, lives in north London with his wife Morwenna Banks, 58, and two children. Late last year came the alarming sight of anti-Jewish graffiti sprayed on a synagogue and shop fronts in Hampstead and Belsize Park. ‘I tweeted about how it was reminiscent of things my grandparents ran away from in their neighbourhood in Germany before the war. I know of specific images of the Star of David and the word Jude being painted like that on shops back then.’
Baddiel in the poster for his new tour. ‘You can make a joke about any subject, it depends on the joke,’ insists Baddiel
Baddiel has an unusual, one-word profile on Twitter that just says: ‘Jew’. He has 647,000 followers and is both witty and outspoken, sometimes breathtakingly so. When Richard Dawkins’s mother died he tweeted to his fellow atheist: ‘Sorry to hear that Richard. She is of course not in a better place.’ Now he wonders if he went too far. But it still raises a laugh in his new stand-up tour.
We’re talking at the Arts Depot in Finchley, north London, where Baddiel is preparing for a warm-up show. It’s based on his adventures on Twitter, including confronting the likes of Katie Hopkins and getting a very funny, very rude response from Hugh Grant to a tweet about insomnia. There are also examples of the names he gets called – which can’t be repeated here – that he says are hurtful. Getting trolled in this way has actually changed his comedy. ‘When I was younger I used to attack people more. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, maybe my response was disproportionate. We are all frightened now. No one says anything public without looking over their shoulder and wondering, Have I said something wrong? Am I going to get in trouble?’
I used to be certain we as a species were progressing slowly upwards, but now I don’t think that at all
Not that this has stopped him making merciless fun of his online opponents, so have any of them ever challenged him in real life?
‘I’ve met a lot of people who follow me on Twitter but I’ve never met anyone who has trolled me. I think it is quite hard to be as angry and abusive face to face as it is online. But my fear is that as we get more and more normalised to abuse online, it will start spreading away from the screen. People will be angrier and more violent and more horrible to each other in real life, which is happening now.’
Where does his compulsion to speak out come from? ‘I have an issue, which is that I am on-the-spectrum honest. I know that sounds self-aggrandising but I don’t mean it that way. I find it very difficult to lie. I also very rarely monitor what I am saying before I say it. I control that better now, but on Twitter sometimes I don’t. Most of what I say I can justify, but not all of it. It comes from my dad. He is a much more aggressive person than me. I see in my dad a no-nonsense, robust attitude to life. There’s a bit in my Trolls stand-up about him – he is much more “male” than me.’
Former prisoners celebrate the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945
David Baddiel at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC for his new BBC documentary
How is his father doing these days? ‘He is still with us. Only just, really. He’s not great. The other day, as part of his not-greatness, one of his eyes started to droop. It’s not a stroke, it’s not a palsy, we don’t really know what it is. So the carer took him to hospital. While he was there a junior doctor was tapping away at the eye and asked him: “Is that painful?” My dad said: “If you carry on it will be!”’
I laugh and he says: ‘That’s amazing, because there are only shreds of him left, but what is left of my dad is this really blokey banter thing, which is so him.’
Baddiel’s wife Morwenna has spotted it in him. There’s a moment in the new stand-up show where he recalls her asking him: ‘Is there any chance you could say the SECOND thing that comes into your mind?’
Morwenna is a comedian and voiceover artist best known for being Mummy Pig in the children’s cartoon series Peppa Pig. ‘I have very often done the joke: “My wife is Mummy Pig. That’s complicated, for a Jewish bloke.” It always gets a laugh. But she is very different from me in many ways. Notably, she is utterly private and doesn’t really like me talking about her, which I am doing now. She sort of won’t acknowledge that we are married most of the time!’
He smiles, having been with Morwenna for more than 20 years. Family is obviously really important to him in his mid-50s, but as social media amplifies the fears and confusion of the world, where else does he find his own identity and security in life?
‘Well, there is a good answer and a disturbed answer. The good answer is that I am very me. I am relentlessly, wearily me. I find it deeply disturbing to move an iota away from myself. That allows me to feel naturally very grounded in a world that is shifting all the time.’
And what’s the disturbed answer? ‘The disturbed version is that no, I sometimes feel very anxious and worried and “what the f***’s going on?” I used to be more certain of how we as a species were progressing very slowly upwards, but now I don’t think that at all.’
David Baddiel with his father, Colin, and brother, Ivor, in his documentary about Colin’s dementia, The Trouble With Dad
When he first became famous in the Nineties there was a great spirit of optimism around, finding a theme tune in the song he and Frank Sinner wrote for the Euro 96 tournament Three Lions, with the refrain: ‘Football’s coming home.’ But those heady days seem a long way off now. ‘People who lived through the Nineties after the Berlin Wall came down thought: “We’ve done it. We’ve got through the absolute s*** of all that war and all that terror.” Then we created technology that made everyone hate each other and not know what truth is.’
He’s talking about the internet but smiles to himself. ‘The weird thing about that is that I am addicted to it. It feeds a narcissistic need in me to have an audience at all times. You do a joke, you get lots of likes, lots of retweets, lots of people joining in. So that’s brilliant and that’s nice, generally.’ It’s not just about the jokes, though. ‘The narcissism is that I think I’ve got something important to say. So all that is fed by social media and not always in a good way.’
He also knows that Twitter can be uplifting, and his new show celebrates that, such as when he asked his followers to send messages of support to his brother Dan, who was struggling with life. They did so in droves. ‘The show acknowledges the upbeat – it finds community and comfort in social media as well as the awful things.’
But Baddiel also uses it to point things out that he doesn’t like. When Jeremy Corbyn last year mispronounced Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted abuser friend of Prince Andrew, as ‘Ep-shteen’ rather than the correct ‘Ep-steen’, Baddiel tweeted: ‘Every Jew noticed that.’
The Labour leader was already being accused of anti-semitism. ‘I got trolled enormously by the Left but a very prominent Jewish journalist direct-messaged me immediately and said: “Absolutely, why doesn’t he just say ——.” They inserted something very obviously unsuitable for this conversation, but the point was the amplification of Epstein’s Jewishness by saying ‘Ep-schhh-teen’. That absolutely may not have been what Jeremy Corbyn meant. I am totally behind the idea that that was not at the front of his mind, but everybody noticed it.’
Does he think Corbyn is anti-semitic? ‘No, an anti-semite is someone who believes Jews are evil, that Jews control the world and that they are also vermin. He doesn’t think those things at all. But he is part of a discourse which – at a time of intense identity politics – has not included Jews in the protections that the Left offers. That has an anti-semitic effect.’
Is it possible to make any jokes about the Holocaust? ‘You can make a joke about any subject, it depends on the joke,’ insists Baddiel, who has even done so in a tweet: ‘[The author] Devorah Baum told a joke about how a survivor dies, goes to heaven, tells God a Holocaust joke. God says: that’s not funny. The survivor says: Ah, well – I guess you had to be there.’ Baddiel also added a comment straight from his atheist heart: ‘That’s a beautiful joke. Because, of course, he wasn’t.’
There’s no doubting that this is personal. ‘My grandparents didn’t talk that much about the war but I once asked Grandma if she had any brothers or sisters. She mentioned my Uncle Joe, who I knew, but then said: “I had another brother, but you will have to ask Mr Hitler what happened to him.”’
Some campaigners have urged him not to give Holocaust deniers publicity by taking them on, but he says they already get plenty on the web. ‘Great lies have power and they spread quicker than ever. It’s out of control. I don’t know whether confronting it is going to work. No doubt you change very few of those deniers’ minds. But I do think there are a lot of people who just don’t know much about this culture of denial and I would rather they were forewarned: “Here is the truth and here are the lies.”’
Any doubts about whether he was doing the right thing faded away, he says, when he met the survivor Rachel Levy. She was 14 when the Nazis transported her to Auschwitz with her family. Tears flowed as she told him how her mother and her little siblings aged ten, eight and two were taken away immediately to be killed in the gas chamber.
‘I loved meeting Rachel. It was really important to be able to speak to someone who is crystal clear. She talks about these incredible things as if they were yesterday. I don’t know how any Holocaust denier could watch that and say: “She’s lying.”’
While you can joke about anything, says Baddiel, some truths are not negotiable.
David Baddiel’s new stand-up tour ‘Trolls: Not The Dolls’ runs until May: davidbaddiel.com. ‘Confronting Holocaust Denial’ with David Baddiel is coming later this month on BBC2