He has written the children's books The Parent Agency, The Person Controller, AniMalcolm, Birthday Boy, Head Kid, and The Taylor TurboChaser.

He also launched his podcast, "A Muslim and a Jew Go There" with Sayeeda Warsi and filmed a travelogue with Hugh Dennis, "Two Men on a Bike" released in 2025.

[1][3] His father, Colin Brian Baddiel, came from a working-class Swansea family,[4] of Eastern European Jewish background; he worked as a research chemist with Unilever before being made redundant in the 1980s, after which he sold Dinky Toys at Grays Antique Market.

[5][6] She was five months old when she was taken to England by her parents in 1939 after the family had fled Nazi Germany, where her wealthy father had been stripped of his assets as a victim of Kristallnacht.

[7] Baddiel said in 2022 that he had been parented by his elder brother Ivor, as "my dad was unemployed and angry, while my mum was distracted by her passionate affair".

investigated Baddiel's heritage in some detail,[5] but failed to prove his theory that his mother had been secretly adopted from another Jewish family who had no hope of escaping.

[9] Baddiel grew up in the Dollis Hill area of London alongside his two brothers Ivor and Dan (one older, one younger).

[11] After leaving university, Baddiel became a professional stand-up comedian in London, as well as a writer for acts such as Rory Bremner and series including Spitting Image.

Subsequently, paired up with Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis, another comedy duo, they began writing and performing in The Mary Whitehouse Experience on BBC Radio 1, where the show ran for four series and a special.

Despite a fraught working relationship, the show saw Newman and Baddiel find enormous success as live performers, held up as examples of comedy as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’, with their tour (Newman and Baddiel: Live and In Pieces) culminating in the first-ever sold-out gig for a comedy act at Wembley Arena, playing to 12,500 people.

During this time the duo also twice topped the UK Singles Chart with the football anthem "Three Lions", co-written and performed with The Lightning Seeds.

[24][25] Baddiel has issued a number of apologies on social media and in an article for The Daily Telegraph, saying it was "part of a very bad racist tradition".

In his 2021 book Jews Don't Count, Baddiel said that, despite apologizing for the Jason Lee impression "on various occasions", people, particularly on social media, continued to share it in order to silence him: After ending Fantasy Football League, the pair took an improvised question-and-answer show to the Edinburgh Fringe which then became a television series, Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned, which ran for five series on ITV, as well as a West End run at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 2001.

In the clip, Baddiel uses "pikey", a pejorative term used to refer to people who are of a Traveller community, to negatively denote his own appearance.

[29][30][31] Baddiel has written four novels: Time for Bed (1996), Whatever Love Means (2002), The Secret Purposes (2006), and The Death of Eli Gold (2011).

He also wrote the comedy film, The Infidel, starring Omid Djalili, Richard Schiff, Matt Lucas and Miranda Hart.

[34] In 2004, Baddiel created and hosted Heresy, a BBC Radio 4 panel show which sees celebrity guests trying to overthrow popular prejudice and received wisdom.

In 2016, he fronted a four-part travel documentary for Discovery entitled David Baddiel On the Silk Road, a 4,000-mile journey to explore the most famous trade route in history, as well as presenting two episodes of BBC2's Artsnight and becoming a regular presenter of The Penguin Podcast in which he interviews authors about the objects that inspired their books, which has seen him interview guests including Johnny Marr, Zadie Smith and Ruby Wax.

[36] In 2013, he returned to stand-up comedy with his critically acclaimed show Fame (Not the Musical), which ran at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring to London's Menier Chocolate Factory and a subsequent nationwide tour.

"[47] In April 2017, Baddiel wrote an article for The Guardian in which he was critical of Ken Livingstone's comments regarding Adolf Hitler and Zionism, but also made it clear that he was not a Zionist and that he disagreed with "religion being the basis for statehood" and what he called "the appalling actions of the present Israeli government".

The book asserts that double standards are extensively employed (either knowingly or unknowingly) by anti-racists when dealing with antisemitism, stating that "a sacred circle is drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go into battle for, and it seems as if the Jews aren't in it".

[53] In February 2009, Baddiel and several other entertainers wrote an open letter in The Times supporting leaders of the Baháʼí Faith who were then on trial in Iran.

He performed a special one-off charity gala of his My Family: Not the Sitcom show at the Vaudeville Theatre, with all proceeds from the evening being split between the Alzheimer's Society, the National Brain Appeal, and the Unforgettable Foundation.

[56] To benefit the cancer charity CLIC Sargent, Baddiel narrated the 2018 short film To Trend on Twitter with fellow comedians Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton, and Helen Lederer, and actor Jason Flemyng.

[57] In March 2019, Baddiel hosted Comic Relief Does University Challenge on BBC One as part of Red Nose Day.