David Baddiel’s My Family: Not the Sitcom at The Menier Chocolate Factory is deeply personal, cathartic and very, very funny
David Baddiel – My Family: Not the Sitcom | The Menier Chocolate Factory | ★★★★☆
A couple of years ago, after a long hiatus, David Baddiel returned to stand-up. Fame: Not the Musical was a wide-ranging investigation of what it means to be famous; it wove together personal anecdotes and dick jokes to produce a show that was more than just laughs. If it had a weakness, it was that it relied too heavily on Twitter and his family for inspiration. His new show narrows his focus to only this material, and this time it works just fine.
He talks about the Social Justice Warriors on Twitter, who lie in wait preparing to take offence at jokes; sometimes wilfully misunderstanding them so they can find a platform for their virtuous outrage. “Anger,” he says, “turns up the volume on who you are.” If you joke about a dead person, some do-gooder will inevitably complain: “Too soon.”
But since his last show, Baddiel’s mother has died, and his father has developed an aggressive form of dementia that has unleashed his curmudgeonly id. If he wants to joke about these things, Baddiel asks, who is there that can tell him it’s too soon?
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He’s disarmingly honest as he talks about his parents, including his mother’s decades-long extramarital affair with a golf memorabilia salesman who looked like the human embodiment of Old Spice. In so doing he draws a picture of a wonderful woman who lived a full life, and wrote truly atrocious erotic poetry. My Family is the obituary he never had the chance to deliver at her funeral.
For Baddiel, this must be a form of catharsis, but it’s a far cry from the cliché of the sad clown using the stage as a psychiatrist’s couch. He understands how his parents shaped him, even how they messed him up, but his core thesis seems to be that however parents behave in front of their children, “if love is love, it doesn’t matter”.
In recent years personal tragedy has proven a rich vein for comedians, but here Baddiel is doing something different. Never morose, seldom heavy, pathos and bathos merge to reveal a suburban, domestic divine comedy, which is unique to his family, but understandable to all.