David Baddiel Quotes

I hate predicting football scores that mean a lot to me, because even though I’m an absolute materialist and don’t believe in anything superstitious, I get superstitious.

I’m not saying Jews should only play Jews… I personally think actors should be allowed to act.

Most people who know me well say I am almost autistically myself. I like to never change.

I’ve been aware of my own mortality since I was 12.

Everyone is complicated, but when you‘re famous, you have to be pigeon-holed. By doing different stuff, that’s rubbed up in complicated ways against the culture.

I’ve met a lot of people who follow me on Twitter but I’ve never met anyone who has trolled me.

I spend a lot of time on social media and people ask me if the abuse I get is upsetting, but working in comedy has built up my skin – I’m used to hecklers.

I think I have a problem. I’m incredibly open about myself.

If you can get tickets, a show on Broadway is worth the effort and expense.

I am a comedian. I do feel I have to put my experience on a public stage. As an artist, that’s what I do. Even though that sounds poncey.

I cook roasts and pasta and curries and all sorts of things – generally things that aren’t one composite thing, like a cake is.

I don’t believe in God but I do believe in Larry David.

I had a ‘the Cure‘ hairstyle, bigger even than Robert Smith‘s for many years. I used to do jokes about it which went well, but which meant I had to keep sporting it long after it was fashionable.

My mum‘s death was appalling.

I went to a Jewish primary school and all my parents‘ friends were Jewish.

I can’t really do characters. I don’t do voices.

I tend to feed the trolls because it gives me material for my work. I’m sometimes taken aback by the racist and antisemitic abuse I get, but most of the time I’ll get angry for a second, and then remind myself, ‘This is material.’ The trick is not to be too reactive.

I’ve seen episodes of ‘Friends’ which are as funny as any sitcom I’ve ever seen.

Neurosis, an obsession with stupidly named food, bookishness – these are all OK to class as attributes that come hand in hand with a name that ends in ‘berg’; the only possible exception being the money thing, although clearly we are better at accountancy.

I only work with the ideas I have. I only want to talk about stuff that happens to me.

My theory as to why I first became a comedian is that my mother was always keenest on my younger brother, Dan. It doesn’t bother me now, but it did then and the way I compensated for that was to publicise myself as myself – to tell people who I was in 100 per cent detail, going into every crevice of my life.

He’s a very sweary sort of bad tempered curmudgeon of a man. That’s the joy of my dad, that he‘s not a conventional nice grandpa, or indeed a conventional nice dad.

Dad was hyper-furious about money all the time and we didn’t mix with high-flying or media families.

All the things I’ve done mean something to me.

My contention is even people who are living without social media are not just aware of it, they are affected by it.

My parents are very unusual characters, both of them – they’re both only children, and they’re great, but neither of them are the sort of standard idea of a parent, and not of Jewish parents.

Mum died on a Saturday – apparently that’s quite common. Dad already had dementia, and my brother and I had to let him know the news. Forty-five minutes later we had to tell him again. We spent the whole of that Sunday reminding him over and over.

I spent a long time on a big studio sitcom, ‘Baddiel’s Syndrome,’ for Sky, and got no audience.

Without wishing to sound pretentious, my basic standard of happiness is to do with being who I am.

When I first started on telly, I used to get quite a lot of fan mail from Indians saying it’s great that an Indian is on!

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?

When I was growing up I don’t think Muslims and Jews were considered to be opposites.

The majority of Jews are secular… the Nazis never checked if anyone was going to the synagogue or eating kosher.

It gives me cancer to have an idea but not do it. Whether I get into trouble for it is not as important as the need to chase the idea.

We’re not designed to know hundreds of people – we’re designed to know four people in our village. So the only way we can know hundreds of people is by reducing them to a stamp of their identity.

Our culture is being shaped by trolls and the Holocaust deniers are a very extreme example of the trolls. Ignoring them has not worked. It doesn’t mean that confronting them will work completely but I think it’s a debate we have to have.

I have an issue with classical music.

I am someone who is going to say what I want to say.

I had probably never met a non-Jew until the age of 12.

I feel uncomfortable if I’m not my self in any situation.

If you go on stage, or on TV, then there is an impetus that comes about to be a persona. A completely different character. But when you’re someone like me, you don’t want to have a persona. I want to be exactly who I am on stage.

To disarm a troll, you don’t try and destroy them straight away, you take onboard what they’re saying and then destroy them.

I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.

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.

Fame is a silly thing that makes your life absurd.

Virtually any practical task becomes chaos within seconds of me getting near it.

Football fandom is this, it’s magical thinking, it’s hope over experience.

I like trolls. Some trolling I find very entertaining. The sheer abuse can be hilarious, and so random and absurd.

Vegas felt glamorous on the outside but disappointing on the inside.

I am not a very good actor.

I remember watching an episode of ‘Seinfeld‘ in which George can’t understand why security guards can’t sit down. He gets obsessed with it and eventually buys a chair for a security guard who sits down and goes to sleep. The shop gets robbed. That’s a brilliant extrapolation of what is essentially observational comedy.

I don’t believe in God, so I’d say that laughter is one of the only true weapons for fighting against real darkness, grief and loss.

An academic is what I would have been if I hadn’t been successful as a comedian. I’ve never had a proper job.

When I first started, stand-up comedians writing novels was thought of as a great encroachment on the art form and people got very angsty. But comedians are storytellers so it’s really a hop, skip and a jump.

Everything I do is storytelling; storytelling is about curiosity.