Top 70 David Baddiel Quotes

I can’t bear the idea that I might be in any way deluded about myself.

My dad has dementia, so I monitor my own memory in a way that other people may not. As an atheist, I don’t believe in an afterlife so I feel I need to fit in as much as I can while I’m here.

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

I’m incredibly uncommitted to party politics. I vote Labour but only because Glenda Jackson was my MP and I loved her on ‘Morecambe & Wise.’

Fame is a silly thing that makes your life absurd.

I was always very against the idea that for comedy to be ‘important’ it has to be dark. It’s very much a critic’s way of thinking.

The food in central Asia is not so great: it tends to be horse.

My mum’s death was appalling.

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.

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.

I am an intellectual.

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

I don’t think comedians are better travellers but they are communicators and storytellers.

Comedy is a difficult thing for a critic, as, unlike all other art-forms, it has an inbuilt success-o-meter: laughter. Therefore, there’s no real need for critics.

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

I am a nice boy.

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

The first proper car I had was an old Nissan Micra.

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.

Furious protesters don’t come after you for jokes at the expense of people; they come after you for jokes at the expense of their gods.

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

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

With the Kick It Out campaign, I was interested in asking: ‘Why is antisemitism a lesser racism than other racisms?’ I genuinely believe that to be the case – that negative stuff said against Jews isn’t considered that important.

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.

I thought I was great at football. For a long time I thought I could have been a professional if I’d wanted to.

When I retweet a troll, I’m not thinking of the troll, I’m thinking of the audience: how can I make them laugh with me, at him?

I think ‘Friends’ is brilliant and it was massively underrated in this country for a very British reason, which is the assumption that because the cast is beautiful, it must be vacuous. Whereas in fact, it’s brilliantly, brilliantly written.

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.

I see social media mainly just talked about as if it has just changed us technologically and in terms of data. I think it has changed absolutely everything. It has changed truth, it has changed culture. It has certainly changed the way that we relate to each other and in a very short amount of time.

Because I’ve been around for quite a long time and done a lot of different stuff, there’s a shifting idea of who I am.

I don’t want to be one of those old people getting up at 5 A.M. to potter.

I’ve always been an insomniac, and as I’ve got older that’s got harder.

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 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.

All of my children’s books are attempts to tap into what I believe to be children’s, and to some extent human beings’, fantasies.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Baddiel is a slightly quizzical name – it comes from Latvia but people thought it sounded vaguely Hindustani or something. I thought it might be a good idea to write a body swap movie, like ‘Trading Places’ or ‘Freaky Friday,’ about somebody who believes they are one thing but suddenly become another.

I’ve adapted my own work a couple of times, and I’ve also given my novels to other people to adapt, and I do find that quite difficult.

We were much poorer than many families.

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.

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

Frank Skinner was a terrible flatmate in some respects. He never cooked and the cleaning lady refused to go into his room. But he was brilliant because he was very, very funny. You could just sit around at home and have a laugh without having to rely on any social arrangements.

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!

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

It was definitely a challenging upbringing. My parents were by no means perfect.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Fame doesn’t allow for complexity, especially complexity of character.

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

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

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

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

Basically, out of the sphere of what I do – being a comedian/writer, and out of the sphere of football, I am incredibly uncompetitive.

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.

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.