-Our next guest is a comedian and writer
whose book, "Jews Don't Count," is available now.
Please welcome to the show David Baddiel.
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-How are you? -I'm all right.
Actually, I'm jet-lagged 'cause I flew in from London,
so I was up at 4:00 a.m. this morning.
But it's okay 'cause I'm an insomniac.
-Oh, okay. So, yeah, kind of those dovetail together nicely.
-Yeah, but the thing is -- You didn't do it,
but when you tell people you're an insomniac,
I've noticed, they often say,
"Oh, I'm always asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow."
And I always want to say, "Right, if I told you
I was blind, would you have said, 'Oh, really?
I can see perfectly'"? [ Laughter ]
-You're right. It's very unfair that they do that.
-It really is, yeah. -I'm so glad now, looking back,
that I didn't say that. -Yeah, I'm glad you didn't.
-'Cause it's true, David. As soon as it hits the pillow...
[ Laughter ] So I know you to be --
You're a comedian, you're a writer,
you've written screenplays.
I did not realize this about you.
You wrote a football anthem.
-Thanks for calling it football.
-Well, I know who I'm talking to, right?
-I thought you were gonna say soccer,
and I was gonna have to claim "No, we got there first."
Yeah, no, that is one of the things I am
very well-known for in England, which is that, in 1996,
me and another comedian and a band, The Lightning Seeds,
we wrote a song called
"Three Lions (Football's Coming Home),"
and it has gone to number one in England four times.
It holds the record for going to number one four times.
And the problem with that is, that my voice is [bleep]
That's what my voice is. [ Laughter ]
-And, like, George Michael and Freddie Mercury
must be turning in their graves at the thought of it.
It got -- When it came out -- I mean, it is really popular.
Right? It gets sung at the grounds.
The Queen goes on TV and says "Football's coming home,"
and some -- it's really, really popular.
But it got, like, the worst review anything's,
I think, ever got when it first came out from "Q" magazine.
-Yeah, sure, I remember "Q" magazine.
-Okay. So "Q" magazine said --
It started off well. It said, "In the future,
people will think of 'Three Lions'
as better than it was.
In the future," they said, "folk memory will erase
the memory of David Baddiel's singing just as effectively
as it has erased the memory
of corpse robbers during the Blitz."
[ Laughter ]
I'm, like, almost proud to be insulted on such a scale.
-It really is. But just to give people a sense,
this is a song you wrote being sung at football grounds.
-Yeah. -Let's just take a listen.
♪ It's coming, football's coming home ♪
♪ It's coming home, it's coming home ♪
♪ It's coming, football's coming home ♪
-There are more lyrics than what we showed there.
-Yeah, there are.
-I feel that doesn't show the breadth of your work.
-You're a sports fan, right? -I am, yeah.
-Okay. So, the main lyrics are about how England
are gonna lose, probably, because that is actually
the history of England at big tournaments,
but we think somehow they're gonna win.
And that's what chimed, I think, with football fans.
But I tell you something, when it first got sung like that
at Wembley Stadium, it was, like,
I didn't know it was gonna happen.
I'm sitting there with Frank Skinner,
who also wrote it, and, suddenly, we've beaten Scotland,
and the whole stadium erupts.
And everyone knows the words, right?
-Yeah, you made it pretty easy. -Well, yeah.
[ Laughter ]
Yeah, I did.
I knew what I was playing with these football fans, right?
But that was amazing. It's sort of --
You know you're meant to say that the best day of your life
is when your kids are born. -Yeah.
-Yeah, [bleep] that.
That was the best day of my life.
[ Laughter ] -I believe it.
-It was really amazing, yeah.
-I want to talk about what's inside the book,
but let's start with the title.
It's very provocative, to say the least.
It was very strange to say it to the audience tonight.
-Okay. I noticed you qualified it
by saying, "He argues that they do."
-Yeah, or they should, I guess, is really what you argue.
-Well, the title is provocative, and a few people have --
and, like, a woman wrote to me from here, from New York,
saying, "I've tried to read this in the hair salon,
and I got some weird looks." Right?
But in Germany -- so, this book's come out in Germany,
which perhaps shows what the problem is.
[ Laughter ]
It's come out in Germany, and the German publishers
wrote to me, and they actually said,
"We can't call it --" It's "Juden zahlen nicht" --
"Jews Don't Count," in Germany.
They wrote me this very serious e-mail.
They said, "With our history."
And I was tempted to troll them and say, "Sorry. What history?"
-Yeah, exactly. [ Laughter ]
-"What are you talking about?"
See how long I could keep that going for.
-Right, right, right. -But eventually they said,
"No, we can't do it," and they called it something else.
You've got it there. They called it "Und die Juden?"
question Mark, which means, "And The Jews?", question mark,
which sounds creepier to me. -Yeah!
-It sounds more like something that an S.S. general would say
to, like, Hitler. Like, that's the last thing
they say in the meeting, and he just looks really cross.
-Yeah. -Yeah, yeah.
-This is a book where you argue that anti-Semitism
should be judged the same as racism,
that it is, in fact, racism, and it's often not valued the same.
-Well, it's a book about the anti-race --
the identity politics conversation.
-Yeah. -And about how,
in that conversation, which has intensified incredibly
over the last 20 years, it seems to me that anti-Semitism,
which is a very old racism, very old form of discrimination,
is kind of very low in the mix of that.
It kind of feels like people aren't so bothered about it.
I start the book with about 12 examples of this.
For example, I'm sitting at home,
I'm listening to Jeremy Irons in 2019 read out
all of T.S. Eliot's poetry on BBC Radio 4,
which is a very kind of posh thing.
And I know that I'm gonna get to lunchtime,
and he's gonna read out the lines, which are real lines
from T.S. Eliot, "The rats are underneath the piles,
the Jew is underneath the lot."
And my point is not that T.S. Eliot is an anti-Semite.
We know it. The point is, where's the reaction to that?
In a trigger space that we exist in, from microaggression
against all minorities, why is Twitter not alive
with fury at that and statues of T.S. Eliot being toppled?
I'm not asking for that to happen.
I'm asking why there is no conversation about it.
-And why -- it must have occurred to you
and your publishers, as well, coming at it
from a comedian's perspective, it doesn't seem like necessarily
a topic that would be rich for,
you know, sort of comic mining of the material.
What made you decide to want to approach it in the first place?
-Well, I don't just do comedy. I've become --
As I get older -- I find, as I get older,
I'm allowed to talk about serious stuff.
-Yeah. -There is jokes in it.
I talk about, in fact, meeting a Jewish football commentator
who interviewed me once and told me once he wasn't Jewish.
And then I met him later on at the World Cup in Japan
in a sauna, and he was. -Okay, yeah, yeah.
[ Laughter ] -So there are jokes in it.
Right? Right? But, yeah, it's mainly serious.
I mean, the point you made about racism,
I note, in America, this is a more complex thing,
is that there seems to be a problem with calling
anti-Semitism racism.
And if you want the argument for it, I'm an atheist.
But that would get me no free passes out of Auschwitz.
I've noticed that white supremacists,
they don't check whether I keep kosher before they think,
"I'll burn down that Jew's house."
Do you know what I mean? -Sure.
-Right? So, for me, it's an accident of birth
that the racists hate me for, and so, therefore, it's racism.
And, you know, I mean, as it happens,
being an atheist and a Jew is kind of a weird thing
because people don't understand that, either.
But, basically, I don't believe in God,
I believe in Larry David.
It's quite straightforward for me, right?
Actually, can I just tell you a quick story?
-Please. -Because I use that sometimes
to get out of -- Because it's very common
being an atheist and a Jew, but I use it sometimes
to get -- because I'm well-known in Britain --
to get out of stuff I get asked to do
by the local Jewish community.
So this rabbi rang me up. My local rabbi --
I've never met him -- somehow got my number --
and says, "Can you light the menorah,
the big menorah, in London?
You come and light it, because you're kind of Mr. Jew, right?"
[ Laughter ] And I didn't want to do it.
So I played what I thought -- my trump card.
I said, "I'm sorry to tell you this,
rabbi, but I'm an atheist."
He said, "So am I." I thought "[Bleep]
I mean, like --" [ Laughter ]
How common has that become amongst Jews, right?
-I know that when you write about something
that is this provocative in topic,
you're gonna hear from, you know, both sides.
But I heard that you have an Internet troll of a sort
living in your own home. -I do have that.
I have my son Ezra, who --
I don't know if you've got a teenage son.
-No, not yet. -But it is like living
with a, yeah, an Internet troll.
He likes to humiliate me, and he uses, I guess,
my public profile against me, to some extent.
But he's clever, and he's good with technology.
So, for example, we were in Cornwall last summer,
and it's by the sea. And I was just driving there
with my family, and that summer, my car stereo had packed up.
So I was using a -- like, a Bluetooth personal speaker
for the music in the car.
And it's just on the dashboard.
We get out of the car. It's a really crowded car park.
I'm holding that in front of me because I think,
"I don't want it to be stolen." I'm holding that.
I'm holding, like, swimming costumes and towels or whatever.
It was really awkward. I noticed that Ezra
is doing something with his phone,
but I'm not really paying attention.
Then suddenly, this speaker starts playing,
incredibly loudly, this incredibly Jewish music.
Right? [ Laughter ]
[ Vocalizing to the tune of "Hava Nagila" ]
And I could see all the people in the car park look around
and clearly think, "Oh, look, there's David Baddiel."
[ Laughter ]
"I guess he must have to have music like that
around him all the time.
Any minute now, he'll be doing this, I imagine."
[ Laughter ]
-Got to love a teenage kid who can take it out of his dad.
-You know what? I was humiliated,
but I was proud because that is a good gag.
-Yeah, exactly. -Yeah.
-It feels like he ticks both the boxes of Judaism
and comedy in the same moment. -Exactly.
That's what I would want for him.
-Thank you so much for being here.
Congratulations on the book. -It's lovely to be here.
-That's David Baddiel, everybody.
"Jews Don't Count" is on sale now wherever books are sold,
but please support local and independent bookstores.