Episode 1386 - Live with David Baddiel
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening thanksgiving happy thanksgiving can you handle it are you okay there did you get your cooking done what's happening with the turkey are you doing the turkey now what are you making right now
Marc:Are you working on cakes?
Marc:Are you doing cakes?
Marc:Are you doing sweet potatoes?
Marc:Are you doing Brussels sprouts?
Marc:Are you doing that weird green bean casserole that no one really eats anymore, but some people have grown comfortable with it?
Marc:Are you doing the weird sweet potatoes with the marshmallows and the brown sugar?
Marc:Are you being healthy?
Marc:You don't be healthy.
Marc:It's one day a year where you can fuck off.
Marc:How are you doing your turkey?
Marc:Did you brine it?
Marc:Did you baste it?
Marc:Did you put spices underneath the skin?
Marc:What have you done?
Marc:Have you have you tried?
Marc:Did you blow up your house trying to fry it?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:Is there like is there a fire in your neighborhood because you exploded your idea of having a fried turkey?
Marc:What's going on with your bird?
Marc:Did you do a duck?
Marc:How many ducks out there?
Marc:Any geese?
Marc:Anyone do a geese?
Marc:Anyone do a tofu turkey thing?
Marc:Not great.
Marc:You know what you're getting with that.
Marc:What have you got going?
Marc:Mashed potatoes, garlic potatoes, anything new, anything happening?
Marc:Did you make some weird variation of cranberry sauce with a spice that probably shouldn't be in cranberry sauce, but you read it in a magazine, so you thought, why not try it?
Marc:And then everybody at dinner was like, what's wrong with this cranberry sauce?
Marc:Did you do that?
Marc:Did you do that with some tarragon or some other kind of weird thing?
Marc:Did you add something to something traditional that you did out of boredom in hopes that it would be an exciting new thing, but instead, not unlike traditions of any kind, everyone was up in arms?
Marc:how dare you do that why change anything don't you understand we're trying to keep thanksgiving consistent what are you what are you an artist what are you a fucking artist happy thanksgiving good luck with the pies all right so you know how it goes look today i'm doing uh uh this is a recording of a live show i did at the bloomsbury theater in london
Marc:Had a nice live audience.
Marc:My guest was comedian and writer David Baddiel.
Marc:He's a stand up.
Marc:He's a writer of children's books.
Marc:He's a writer of grown up books like his book Jews Don't Count, which he also turned into a documentary that's out now.
Marc:And I had not read it.
Marc:I'd heard about him and I set out to read his book.
Marc:I read the book.
Marc:You know, it's interesting where you deal with a British writer writing primarily about Britain, where, you know, class is a thing and happens and is acknowledged.
Marc:But also in talking about the left, they have an established sort of left there that has definition.
Marc:Unlike here, don't talk about class here unless it's the middle class disappearing.
Marc:Other than that, no talk of class.
Marc:There's always been talk of class.
Marc:It's ingrained in the class system there.
Marc:So it was an interesting conversation.
Marc:He's also funny.
Marc:I've watched some of his shows.
Marc:He's got interesting family stories, a great history of stand-up stuff.
Marc:So, yeah, so I'm going to play that for you.
Marc:And also, Brian Jones has been making cat mugs for me, obviously, as you know, for years to give my guests.
Marc:And every few months he makes a batch that you can buy, you people, you civilians.
Marc:And now you can go directly to this site, wtfmugs.co.
Marc:Go ahead and bookmark that or sign up for email updates.
Marc:These things go quick.
Marc:I want you to get one.
Marc:New mugs will go on sale this Saturday, November 26th.
Marc:They'll go live at noon Eastern and you'll want to get on that because they usually sell out immediately.
Marc:So, look, I don't know what you're dealing with.
Marc:All right.
Marc:I don't know where you're at this Thanksgiving.
Marc:I do know that this is an interesting time of year because because parents can bond with their kids around my reading of Turkey Trouble for for that charity I did.
Marc:It's a charity called Storyline Online.
Marc:I did it a while ago.
Marc:The woman approached me at the SAG Awards, actually.
Marc:And, you know, it was fun.
Marc:You know, I didn't know what, you know, I don't have children.
Marc:But, you know, I can be entertaining.
Marc:But it's kind of funny because it's pretty popular.
Marc:It's very popular...
Marc:This time of year, obviously, and I always get a lot of nice feedback and sometimes they show it in classrooms.
Marc:It's fun.
Marc:It is fun to read children's books.
Marc:I don't I don't do it often because I don't have children, but you can watch it.
Marc:Go find it.
Marc:It's called Turkey Trouble.
Marc:Mark Maron.
Marc:I guess you could find it that way.
Marc:You can get it right at storyline online and.
Marc:But aside from that, I don't know what's up with you guys.
Marc:I don't know what you're doing.
Marc:I did not go to Florida this year.
Marc:I'm not in Florida this year because there's a couple of reasons.
Marc:In order for me to get out there and to bring...
Marc:kit with me.
Marc:They didn't need me to cook this year because my cousin's doing it.
Marc:So to fly out day before and then hang out day of and then leave the next day and go to Florida for that seemed crazy.
Marc:So I'm going to go see my family another time in the next few weeks before my HBO shooting.
Marc:I think there's some balcony seats for that second show left over.
Marc:But yeah, I'll go see my family then.
Marc:And I'm going to go over to Gimme Gimme Dan's house and I'm going to smoke a brisket
Marc:And I'm going to make a chess pie and I'm going to make the famous stuffing that I got from my from my gourmet existentialism professor who was in love with me.
Marc:Yeah, I believe he's passed.
Marc:I tried to find out, but it seems that I got validation on that.
Marc:That guy did teach me how to cook, though.
Marc:He didn't turn me, but he taught me how to cook.
Marc:So getting back to you, you know, as I say every year and as I've said before, to those of you who have heard me say it, first and foremost.
Marc:Use whatever options you have at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others.
Marc:That means taking a walk, taking a breather, trying to think before you yell, try to keep your shit together in the sense of like you have control over that.
Marc:You can make choices in a moment.
Marc:Take a breath.
Marc:These are aggravating times.
Marc:They're still aggravating times.
Marc:It feels a little better than it has in the last several years.
Marc:I mean, there's a little relief, I think.
Marc:But it's still scary, and there's still a lot of things to be terrified about and angry about.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:But if you're with family, just try.
Marc:I'm going to try.
Marc:I'm taping this, obviously, the day before.
Marc:And I'm going to try to lock into my cooking and enjoy some of that meditation time.
Marc:I've been very busy with a lot of stuff, interviewing people and also going to see movies for guests, which is fine.
Marc:And also having some pretty good conversations lately with a lot of different people.
Marc:Look, enjoy the fucking fall weather.
Marc:I don't know, maybe you're in New York or the East Coast, or maybe it's just you're under snow.
Marc:Look, just please, please, for your own benefit and your free families, just use whatever options you have at your disposal to maintain your sanity without hurting yourself or others.
Marc:You know, there's wiggle room there.
Marc:Hurting yourself does not mean, you know, eating a lot.
Marc:Or shame eating or anger eating or any of that, you know, gorge yourself until you're tired.
Marc:Do that as opposed to argue with your old dad, your old uncle, your old mom, your kids.
Marc:Just eat.
Marc:Eat those feelings.
Marc:Today is a day to eat feelings, especially if you're with your family.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:I don't need to say too much, but try to enjoy your holiday.
Marc:I hope all your food turned out well.
Marc:And, you know, I'll share this live one with you, which was funny.
Marc:And we haven't done one in a while.
Marc:And there's also a little I think I do another intro.
Marc:I did a live intro that night in London.
Marc:So this is me.
Marc:Talking to David Baddiel.
Marc:He is the author of Jews Don't Count.
Marc:You can get that wherever you get books.
Marc:The documentary version is airing on BBC4.
Marc:And please take care of yourselves, will you?
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck, buddies?
Marc:What the fuck, Nick's?
Marc:London, England, welcome.
Marc:Nice to see you.
Marc:Thanks for coming out.
Marc:Yes, yes, I'm here.
Marc:I'm here.
Marc:Welcome.
Marc:Thank you, thank you.
Marc:I was just, I'm very excited to be here.
Marc:I was just talking to David Baddiel backstage.
Marc:He's going to come out soon.
Marc:We were talking about whether or not we needed to pee.
Marc:So...
Marc:That's sort of the age we're at, I guess.
Marc:Very exciting.
Marc:I've been here for a couple days.
Marc:I don't know what's happening in your country.
Marc:I can't pretend to know.
Marc:I'd like to get caught up, get up to speed.
Marc:No fucking idea.
Marc:To be honest with you, I don't know David.
Marc:I wish I was kidding.
Marc:I didn't know anything about him until about a month ago.
Marc:And now I know almost everything about him.
Marc:So that's sort of the way that's going to go.
Marc:I'm sure I'm instilling faith in my ability to him right now back there.
Marc:But I don't know what's happening here also with, like, is there no COVID?
Marc:Because I don't know, like, I was in New York for a week, and now I'm here for a week.
Marc:It just feels like when I get on a train, I'm kind of entering some sort of international COVID lottery.
Marc:Like, maybe I'll get it.
Marc:Maybe I won't.
Marc:Maybe I wear a mask.
Marc:I don't know what people are doing now.
Marc:It's sort of a don't ask, don't test situation.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Where you're kind of like, you know, on a Friday, you're like, no, I kind of feel shitty, but I'm going to wait until Monday.
Marc:Because I want to have a weekend.
Marc:I don't want to fuck up my weekend.
Marc:You hear how hard that guy's laughing back there?
Marc:That's the guy.
Marc:There's one guy with COVID in here.
Marc:You know there is.
Marc:There has to be.
Marc:And he knows it.
Marc:He knows he has it.
Marc:And he came anyway.
Marc:He had bought the ticket.
Marc:He was at home.
Marc:He's like, fuck.
Marc:Everyone's going to get it.
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:I'm going to go.
Marc:I'm going to go.
Marc:I don't know, you guys.
Marc:I guess we're going to do some Jew stuff.
Marc:Because David and I have the same management, and I think it was his idea.
Marc:He's sort of like, I think what we really need is...
Marc:a couple of secular, atheists, self-centered, too much information, Israel-apathetic Jews to have a summit, an international summit of some kind.
Marc:Just want to get a couple of guys that never shut up about themselves to talk about themselves at each other.
Marc:But I do.
Marc:It's interesting because of the Jew thing.
Marc:I read his book, and I enjoyed the book.
Marc:And a lot of it was very sort of Britain-specific.
Marc:Because we don't have... Well, maybe I should talk to him about this.
Marc:He's going to be out here in a minute.
Marc:I thought I'd just ramble on for a bit more.
Marc:So what did I do since I've been here?
Marc:I...
Marc:I don't know what, after a certain point of, I don't travel internationally much and I don't stay here long, but I generally think at some point in my life, I'm 59, that I would know all of the breakfast items.
Marc:And I'm not making a joke about a traditional English breakfast or any of that.
Marc:It took me years to realize that you guys don't eat that every day.
Marc:Like, I really thought it was my job.
Marc:Like, I gotta put all this down every day, the whole thing?
Marc:This is what they do here?
Marc:I wanna be like them.
Marc:But there was something on the menu at my hotel that I had to do research on.
Marc:And tell me, is bubble and squeak a thing?
Marc:So it is.
Marc:How am I 59 years old, and I was looking at the menu, and I'm like, I'm gonna guess what that is.
Marc:And I was off.
Marc:I thought it was some sort of uncuttable sausage.
Marc:That just must be a sausage you can't cut.
Marc:And it just bubbles.
Marc:And it squeaks when you try to cut it.
Marc:That was a pretty good guess, I thought.
Marc:But it's not, it's a cabbage dish and I like cabbage and there's potatoes in it.
Marc:And apparently it was popular if you had absolutely no money at all for a long time.
Marc:Tomorrow I'm gonna have it, I didn't have it today.
Marc:Should I have it?
Marc:But is it something that you guys, do you make it at home?
Marc:Are you like, you know what, I'm going to make Bubble and Squeak tomorrow for the special brunch.
Marc:It is?
Marc:It's that kind of thing?
Marc:Leftovers.
Marc:Oh, so you just put it all together.
Marc:Your potatoes and your cabbage.
Marc:How many people eat that much cabbage?
Marc:I mean, is it that?
Marc:Because I eat a lot of cabbage, oddly, but I didn't know that everybody did.
Marc:You're just sort of like, oh, fuck, we got leftover cabbage again.
Marc:Where are those potatoes?
Marc:That happens like weekly or special?
Marc:All right.
Marc:So the Jew thing.
Marc:Again, I'll bring them up.
Marc:But let me read a couple of emails to set this up, sort of.
Marc:Because I talk about being a Jew a lot, and I do it aggressively.
Marc:And I'm not sure why all the time.
Marc:But I've been doing it for years.
Marc:If I do a comedy special, and this goes way back, where I'm not even sure I gave a fuck necessarily.
Marc:When I was coming up, I really was annoyed.
Marc:Even though I loved the old Jewish comics, I found that they trivialized being Jewish somehow.
Marc:I honestly hated Jackie Mason.
Marc:And it was because...
Marc:He just, like, he would do things like, you know, Jews just like to sit down.
Marc:What does that mean?
Marc:So... And I mean, I didn't know how it benefited anybody.
Marc:If you're a Jew, you'll eat a shrimp, you know?
Marc:What is that?
Marc:You're not supposed to eat them.
Marc:All right, whatever.
Marc:So...
Marc:So I never knew how to be Jewish on stage for years.
Marc:And when I did it, it was always sort of way, way over the, like, I guess it was in 90.
Marc:When did I do that HBO special?
Marc:When I was a kid.
Marc:Em and I had been doing this a long time.
Marc:But I did a whole thing about how, you know, I'm a Jew and, you know, of course, you know, we have all the money.
Marc:and uh yeah we do we have all of it and like that tone i'd be like you could go to almost any synagogue and they have a special room in the basement that's just sort of like gold bricks and jewelry of different sorts and you can go in there and just kind of sit with it and be like i can't believe we have it all yeah
Marc:And there's a weekly newsletter.
Marc:We all get the Jews news that we get.
Marc:And it's just always the same headline.
Marc:We've got all the money again.
Marc:So that was the tone of it.
Marc:And I think somewhat of that tone has remained.
Marc:I just really... I learned something from a guy named Paul Mooney who was...
Marc:a comic, a black comic in America who, you know, used to write for Richard Pryor.
Marc:And, you know, I'm middle for him.
Marc:I featured for him in Sacramento once.
Marc:And he would do like two hours plus for like a primarily white audience.
Marc:And I didn't really understand why, you know, because he didn't do particularly well because he was very aggressive.
Marc:And then I realized it over time after watching him for a week, is that like if you're a white person and you don't think you're racist, after like two hours of Mooney, he'll find it in you.
Marc:Like after about two hours, you're going to be saying to yourself or who you're sitting with things you didn't think you would say.
Marc:So...
Marc:And I think that on some level, you know, a lot of the Jewish material I'm doing now is really specifically for that reason.
Marc:I want to be an aggressively annoying Jew.
Marc:But not in a neurotic way, literally.
Marc:Like lately I've been on stage and I will say, you know, it's amazing we really found out
Marc:in the last few years, what brings most people together, and that's anti-Semitism.
Marc:And then I say, and I just, you know, look, we will replace you.
Marc:We're going to replace you.
Marc:And then I go into a long bit that I don't want to burn because I'm going to probably do it on the special.
Marc:And it's like, I don't, I can't, I'm going to talk to David about this.
Marc:But I get emails, but he's like, you know, he's made it all very public at how he interacts with trolls and stuff.
Marc:And I don't like, I'm not, I'm not poking, I don't poke the Twitter monster because it's just too upsetting to me.
Marc:Like, you know, I like to do it face to face in real life to see what happens.
Marc:But I do get emails.
Marc:Oh, this was an email from David.
Marc:I liked how he told me what to look for.
Marc:And at the very end, after listing all his credits with links, he just says, and I've written four novels and nine children's books.
Marc:And I just took the tone of that as, so there.
Marc:I do want to know how he's so productive, because we're very similar, and our parents were the same, and I don't know how he managed to keep his shit together so well.
Marc:Here are the emails.
Marc:Hi, Mark.
Marc:I like your podcast a lot.
Marc:In one of your last pods, you talked about a guy who criticized all the Jew talk in many of your podcasts.
Marc:You thought he was maybe an anti-Semite.
Marc:I just want to remind you that when having mega-interesting guys in your show, say, for example, Stephen King, David Lee Roth, Gene Simmons, et cetera, I haven't had two of them on that.
Marc:I would not have Gene Simmons in my house.
Marc:And I've talked to David Lee Roth, and that was exciting.
Marc:And Stephen King, I don't think is Jewish.
Marc:Whatever.
Marc:So he goes on to say, not too many listeners give a shit if they are bar mitzvahed, baptized, or if they are Vancouver or Montreal Jews, etc.
Marc:It's just for us listeners, it's not very interesting, but it's your show, and you should run it as you like.
Marc:Good luck, Gunther.
Marc:Real name.
Marc:And I said, Gunter, I will.
Marc:When you said this, you gave yourself away.
Marc:Quote, it's just for us listeners.
Marc:It's not very interesting.
Marc:Unquote.
Marc:You.
Marc:You don't find it interesting.
Marc:Not us.
Marc:That other guy was an anti-Semite.
Marc:I don't know about you.
Marc:Thanks for listening.
Marc:So...
Marc:Then one more, and then I'll bring out David.
Marc:Mark with a K. I don't understand why you have to keep bringing up that you are a Jewish man.
Marc:You're not even a church-going man.
Marc:This guy's very confused right out of the gate.
Marc:but you can't go five minutes without bringing it up.
Marc:I am Native American and Spanish American, and I don't bring it up once a month.
Marc:No one cares about that but you.
Marc:You always bring it up with some of your guests that you know are Jewish.
Marc:No one cares, all caps.
Marc:The only one that does is you.
Marc:Let it go, Michael.
Marc:And I said, anti-Semites care.
Marc:You're asking me to let go of my ethnicity when most of the world wants to erase it.
Marc:You want to erase it.
Marc:Plenty of people care.
Marc:Jews care.
Marc:Maybe ask yourself why you are so mad.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:See?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right now, it's my pleasure to bring out a man I met 15 minutes ago who's done an amazing, amazing amount of work in this country.
Marc:You've known him for half your lives.
Marc:He's done stand-up, he's written books, nine novels, several children's books.
Marc:He had a football show, he was in a team, he wasn't in a team, documentaries, he's Britain's go-to Jew, David Baddiel, ladies and gentlemen.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Hey, Mark.
Guest:Hi.
Guest:Before we talk about the Jew thing... We're going to start at the beginning.
Guest:Okay, well, I want to talk about breakfast, which is kind of the beginning.
Guest:Because you mentioned breakfast, which is kind of an interesting thing for two Jews to talk about because the British breakfast is pork.
Guest:It's just different types of pork, right?
Marc:And cabbage.
Marc:Yeah, and many different types of pork.
Guest:Yeah, like really different shapes of pork.
Marc:Yeah, and ground pork.
Guest:No ground pork.
Guest:Oh, yeah, it is ground pork.
Guest:Sausage is ground pork.
Marc:Yes, it is.
Guest:Yeah, sorry.
Guest:I'm so Jewish, I didn't know that.
Guest:So I did a thing when I was on tour recently.
Guest:I decided to, because I am, as you say, on social media quite a lot, to talk about the fact that when you're on tour in the British hotels, that's what you're offered every morning.
Guest:And if you've got the kind of willpower I've got, you can't not eat it.
Guest:It's fucking impossible not to eat it, right?
Guest:So I would take a picture of it, say, this is my willpower.
Guest:I'm having it again.
Guest:But what happened, and you may not know this, is that it revealed a fault line in the British public, which is they are obsessed with the architecture of the full English breakfast.
Guest:With the plate.
Guest:The layout?
Guest:The map.
Guest:The layout.
Guest:I mean, literally, some people, if my eggs were touching the beans, they'd have a fucking nervous breakdown.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, really.
Guest:People would write and say, I can't look at this.
Guest:Are there people that don't eat them together?
Marc:You can't eat the beans?
Guest:There's quite a famous expression.
Guest:It actually comes from Steve Coogan's character, Alan Partridge, which is that if you have eggs and beans, you have to use the sausages as a breakwater.
Marc:Fuck, I've been eating it wrong.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I want to point out right out of the gate that, look, I don't know you.
Guest:We don't talk.
Guest:You have said that quite a lot.
Guest:It's almost as if you're trying to disassociate yourself.
Marc:But let me just point out, look how we're fucking dressed.
Guest:Look at our fucking faces.
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:It's ridiculous.
Marc:Like you've got look at the same beauty Chelsea's mine are nicer.
Marc:I like them at a point They're shiny.
Marc:No, these were these are nice as nice thick doesn't make them nice a point pointy I like them pointy black jeans.
Guest:Yeah, black jean Western shirt.
Guest:Yeah, and the face I can't believe you're not talking about the faith that I see the face.
Marc:I know the face I
Guest:It's like there's a fucking really odd mirror here.
Guest:I know!
Marc:See, I've always thought, like, I've been mildly obsessed with British Jews my entire life.
Guest:Have you?
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And yet you've never heard of me.
Guest:What the fuck?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the idea of it, not British Jews.
Marc:One British Jew, Peter Green.
Marc:That's the only one.
Guest:Peter Green?
Marc:Yes, Peter Green.
Guest:From Fleetwood Mac?
Marc:Yes, was a British Jew.
Guest:I thought you meant Sir Peter Green.
Marc:No, no, no, Peter Green.
Marc:Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac was a British Jew, and I was so excited about that.
Marc:I'm like, I knew it.
Marc:So...
Marc:Right.
Marc:But the idea that there were British Jews at all when I was younger was just sort of like, that's amazing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And the fact that... Americans don't think there are ethnic minorities in Britain.
Marc:No, we know, we know, we heard, we heard.
Guest:Well, I know, but you're still catching up with them.
Marc:Yeah, we are.
Marc:Yeah, it's a different ethnical landscape.
Guest:You just think we're all people who wear top hats and essentially are members of the royal family, don't you?
Marc:No, I think it was really as simple as I just couldn't, you know, like, I don't know why, but when I was younger, I couldn't really picture a Jew talking like you.
Guest:You mean with a British accent?
Marc:That's right.
Marc:No, with a British accent.
Guest:A Jew who thinks his boots are not as good as yours.
Marc:With a British accent.
Marc:That's a weird thing.
Marc:No, I was young.
Marc:Now I know there's... There's me and Peter Green.
Marc:Yeah, and like...
Marc:And a few other ones.
Marc:There's a few other ones.
Marc:Yeah, there are.
Marc:Not a lot.
Marc:Is there a lot?
Guest:No, there are a lot.
Guest:Actually, that's one of the things I talk about in my book.
Guest:So one of the things I talk about in my book is Jewish shame.
Guest:That's stronger in Britain.
Guest:Because in Britain, Jews are not as out as they are in America.
Marc:Maybe that was why...
Guest:Like one of the things, there's a publication called the Jewish Chronicle, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which is the British Jewish newspaper.
Guest:And someone once said to me, a Jewish person said to me, the headline of the Jewish Chronicle every week is basically, they hate us, right?
Guest:And I said, no, no, it's they hate us and let's not make a fuss about it.
Guest:That is the British Jewish thing.
Guest:So I am unusual in that I am very out.
Guest:I mean, a bit like the guy who wrote to you, he would hate me even more because I am absurdly out about being Jewish.
Guest:And lots of British Jews in comedy aren't, to be honest.
Guest:They're hiding?
Guest:They're not hiding.
Guest:Do you know they're Jewish?
Guest:I know they're Jewish.
Guest:Do they know?
Guest:Well, I wonder if they know they're all Jewish.
Guest:Do you want to out them?
Guest:Go ahead, out them.
Guest:Do you know that Stephen Fry is Jewish?
Yes.
Guest:I did not know that.
Marc:Holy fuck.
Guest:Did you know Ben Elton is Jewish?
Guest:Do you know Ben Elton is Jewish?
Guest:That makes sense.
Guest:Okay, but there's quite a lot of Jews in this audience, and Jews know.
Guest:They do the research.
Guest:Jews know all the Jews, yeah.
Guest:Matt Lucas.
Guest:Okay, I'm trying to find one you don't know.
Guest:Simon Amstel.
Guest:Oh, for fuck's sake.
Guest:And they're all comics.
Guest:My friend... I'm just trying to think of something they don't know.
Marc:Frank Skinner.
Marc:Okay, he's not.
Okay.
Marc:But the thing about being out and Jewish and aggressively out is something that – A lot of people don't like it.
Marc:Well, I know, and it makes a certain point.
Marc:And I'm not always clear as to why I do it.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:I've been doing it a long time aggressively.
Marc:But I don't find myself as some – like intellectually, I think you came into it later too, where you are aggressively –
Marc:Pointing out anti-Semitism and making yourself, I think in my last special, I told the audience I was voluntarily making myself a target because I think it's important.
Marc:But I don't know if it's a selfish thing or it's actually a tremendous deep concern for Jews.
Guest:Well, I was always, from an early time in stand-up, I talked about being Jewish because basically I'm an incredibly limited performer.
Guest:I can't do anything except be myself on stage.
Guest:If I try and do an accent, it's embarrassing.
Guest:I can't move away from myself.
Guest:But you did sketch, you did things.
Guest:Yeah, I was always just myself.
Guest:I was going to say, shit, that's not fair.
Guest:I was just myself in a hat.
Guest:Or myself in big trousers.
Marc:But you calibrate your voice a little bit.
Guest:Not hardly.
Guest:About the only accent I could do is a slightly more Jewish version of my own voice.
Guest:That is the only accent I could do.
Guest:I can't even do Welsh and my dad was Welsh.
Guest:There are Welsh Jews.
Guest:Do you know that?
Marc:It all makes sense.
Guest:Scottish Jews, Welsh Jews.
Marc:Are there Irish Jews?
Marc:Many?
Marc:Yes, of course.
Marc:There are?
Guest:Do you know Jews are all over the fucking world?
Marc:I do know that.
Guest:You know that.
Guest:I do know that.
Guest:You know they got scattered.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:You know that happened.
Marc:Yeah, they ran.
Guest:You know they've been kicked out of every fucking country.
Marc:As a result, they're everywhere.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:New Mexico.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Not Jew Mexico.
Marc:No, but there wasn't that many.
Marc:It's just that there were the Jews that left Europe, and then there were the Jews that wanted to move as far away from their parents as possible in New York.
Marc:So that's where we ended up in New Mexico.
Marc:With a small group of other Jews that were just saying, thank God we're not living near our parents.
Guest:I think that some Jewish people... See, for me, I went to a Jewish primary school, an Orthodox Jewish primary school, which wasn't because my parents were religious.
Guest:It was the nearest primary school in Cricklewood, where I grew up in the 1970s, where I wouldn't get beaten up for being Jewish.
Guest:So they sent me there.
Guest:It was a very Jewish school.
Guest:I had one line in the school play.
Guest:It was this.
Guest:It was, well, Rabbi, you certainly do drive a hard bargain.
LAUGHTER
Guest:You thought rabbi would be the Jewish element.
Guest:No, it was bargain.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It was very Jewish.
Marc:That's a lot to unpack.
Guest:It's all in there.
Guest:It's a lot to unpack.
Guest:Can you not scratch your nose while you're saying that?
Guest:Because that feels almost pointed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But yeah.
Guest:And so I think I did an odd thing, which is that when I realized the whole world wasn't Jewish, in fact, the Jews are a tiny demographic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The damage was done for me.
Guest:Rather than shrinking from that, I just thought, the world should be Jewish.
Guest:I mean, I'm wrong about that, but that's how it felt to me.
Guest:And so I felt really comfortable in my Jewishness.
Guest:And I always have.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think I felt uncomfortable in my Jewishness.
Marc:And I always look to, you know, I think in America,
Marc:There was sort of like this Jewish intellectual period in the 70s.
Marc:And I think that Prozac killed a lot of that.
Marc:I really think that medication destroyed some of the Semitic voice in America.
Marc:There's only one guy, like Richard Lewis.
Marc:You see Richard Lewis now, and he's still Richard Lewis.
Marc:And Partey is sort of like, you know, they have medicine.
Marc:Like you even think that.
Yeah.
Marc:Like, you haven't resolved any of this?
Marc:So, you know, nothing's better?
Marc:There's nothing better.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that's correct.
Guest:That's correct.
Guest:Nothing has got better.
Guest:That's what therapy is, to teach you fucking that.
Marc:Do you go to therapy still?
Guest:Yeah, I did.
Guest:I went to therapy for about 11 years, almost as a kind of thing I just did to realize my Jewishness.
Guest:I don't know that I had any problem.
Guest:I had one particular problem, which has nothing to do with being Jewish, I think, or maybe it is, which is I found it very difficult to split up with anyone.
Guest:I'd be in relationships far too long.
Guest:I'm sorry if any of my ex-girlfriends are listening.
Guest:I was in relationships far too long.
Guest:I was very frightened of splitting up with people.
Guest:Why, though?
Guest:Well, I'll come to that.
Guest:All right, I'll hang out here.
Guest:And I was in therapy for about 11 years.
Guest:And about seven years in, I realized I couldn't split up with my therapist.
Guest:That was what was happening.
Guest:and the reason is i can tell you why actually which is like uh have we done with the we'll come back to the jew thing okay because this is no no yeah we're jumping around maybe this is right which is well that's the big question so when i was first famous right uh i realized that i could have sex with women right yeah uh and they wouldn't have sex with me before right uh and was that true
Guest:Well, I realized that that was a possibility.
Marc:A lifetime of just masturbation.
Guest:Well, I'd been with one Jewish woman and it was mainly masturbation.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's what it's like.
Guest:But I found that I couldn't.
Guest:There were lots of people I knew at the time.
Guest:And all of these people are now sweating.
Guest:I have some payback because they're all now sweating that something's going to happen to them.
Guest:But I don't have that problem because I wasn't able to exploit, as it were, my fame in order to be promiscuous.
Guest:Because I didn't want to be... Can I say this?
Guest:I didn't want to be a cunt.
Guest:And you have to be a complete cunt.
Guest:Someone's applauding that.
Guest:In order to really have sex with a lot of women.
Guest:Because you have to say...
Guest:I don't want to see you anymore, right?
Marc:I guess.
Marc:Sometimes you can just sort of communicate at the beginning, you know.
Guest:Shit, I should have done that.
Guest:You can still be a nice guy and... No, but that's where the Jewishness, I think, may be.
Guest:Not that it's just for Jews, but I couldn't take the thing of, like, saying, okay, now we're moving on.
Guest:I want to be with someone else tomorrow.
Guest:And anyway, I fell in love.
Guest:I just fell in love really quickly.
Guest:With a lot of people?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, but that was the thing I was I've been in a relationship Okay, I really think I was gonna talk about this I was in a relationship between finally we found something that you haven't talked about Well, it's partly because the women in question the with this particular I was in a relationship between 16 and 28 Okay, one relationship 16 to 27 16 to 27 16 to 27.
Guest:Yeah one relationship 11 years a lot of changes happen in years And you hung in there I hung in there she hung in there
Guest:Yeah, we both hung in there.
Guest:That's my point.
Guest:I was unable to split up.
Marc:Did she want to be with you?
Marc:Were you both just sort of like, fuck, how do I tell him?
Marc:Fuck, I want to tell her.
Guest:Okay, so I am a bit worried she might be listening to this because I'm still friends with her.
Guest:But my point is this.
Guest:There's a bit in Seinfeld where George is trying to split up with this woman who he's with in season seven.
Guest:I can't remember the name of the woman.
Guest:Eventually she dies because in the marriage, in the wedding, she licks so many envelopes, she gets glue poisoning.
Guest:He can't stop being overjoyed about it.
Guest:He's trying not to be.
Guest:Anyway, the point is not that.
Guest:The point is, he really wants to split up, but it's making him very unhappy.
Guest:And Jerry takes him to outside her apartment and tells him to go in and just do it.
Guest:He says, it's like ripping off a Band-Aid, right?
Guest:Just do it.
Guest:And he says, I would rather be unhappy my whole life than have that conversation.
Guest:And I think about 70% of couples live like that.
Guest:I do.
Guest:It's just very muted laughter.
Guest:Yeah, I know.
Guest:I've alienated everyone in this room.
Guest:It's my parents, Pali.
Guest:My parents, who are both dead, so I can definitely say this about them.
Guest:Much of the time, they hated each other.
Guest:But splitting up with each other was just not something... They were lower-middle-class Jews.
Guest:They just didn't split up with people like Tofty or whatever.
Marc:I saw that show.
Marc:Your mom definitely had a good time, despite the fact...
Marc:You didn't see the show, did you?
Marc:Yeah, I watched it.
Guest:Oh, you fucking watched it?
Marc:I watched the whole thing.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Marc:I know that you are a child of emotionally self-centered people who are incapable of loving you properly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, it's become the therapy that I never finished.
Marc:And that you probably just are out in the world wanting love, David.
Marc:I do want love.
Guest:That's why I have to eat those full English breakfasts every day to fill the gap.
Marc:You can't break up with people because you're so afraid of rejecting them and losing the love that they have for you.
Guest:That's true.
Marc:All right, we're done.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Guest:So if anyone who doesn't know didn't see my family show, I did a show called My Family, Not The Sitcom.
Guest:Did you not see it?
Guest:Did anyone see that?
Guest:Some people saw it.
Guest:That's good.
Marc:This was like, I watched it and it made me uncomfortable.
Marc:This is another question.
Marc:What the fuck is wrong with this?
Marc:I do that kind of stuff too.
Marc:You just tell people, strangers, all this fucking deep shit that you're not even sure is fucking right.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And then you kind of walk away feeling what?
Marc:Like, well, that's a relief that I dragged those people into it.
Marc:Yeah, that's the julp.
Marc:If you don't realize that, that's what we do.
Marc:You walk up victorious.
Marc:They all feel really uncomfortable and weird about my life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, okay, so this is what happened in that particular show.
Guest:So for anyone who doesn't know, who didn't see it.
Guest:Well, you sent me a bad copy of it.
Marc:You were like, I did this show in Australia and Canada, and there's only one tape existing.
Marc:And midway through the tape or the video, the guy's pointing at his feet or something.
Marc:It's not even a real video, the thing.
Marc:You can't see what you're pointing to on screen.
Marc:I'm like, there's a lot of shame involved in this show.
Marc:You didn't want this to get out.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Did you?
Guest:Well, yeah, I did and I didn't, maybe.
Guest:Maybe that's the dichotomy.
Guest:But the show was mainly about my dad's dementia, and that's what a lot of people knew about it.
Guest:My dad just got it.
Guest:We need to talk about it.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:We should talk about that.
Marc:It's nice now, but it's going to get bad.
Marc:Can I just get out this thing that I need to get out?
Marc:I'm going to let you.
Marc:I just want to make sure I'm present.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:That's how I do it.
Marc:A lot of interrupting.
Marc:You've never listened to my show?
Guest:Never.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, I got a weird bootleg copy once, and it was kind of like it wasn't really clear.
Guest:That's weird.
Guest:Yeah, that's my point.
Guest:So it was also about the fact that my mom had an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman for her whole virtual adult life and transformed our world into a world of golf.
Guest:Because my dad got made redundant when I was quite young, so we had very little money, but we would still have statues of Lee Trevino fucking everywhere.
Guest:And she was very proud of this affair with the golfing memorabilia salesman.
Guest:In fact, a high point in the show
Guest:is at one point she's about to go to New York and she writes to this guy and by that time my mum was getting a little bit older and she was also quite proud of her illnesses.
Guest:She was a Jewish woman and she liked to tell people about her ailments and this email, if I can remember it, says something like, the leukemia and also the Crohn's disease makes me very tired.
Guest:but perhaps you can join me to make the naps more interesting, right?
Guest:And she says this, and people might think, well, that's a private email.
Guest:No, she CC'd it to me and my older brother, right?
Guest:And when I asked her, how did you do that?
Guest:She said, well, it was a mistake.
Guest:What fucking mistake is that?
Guest:Oh, butterfingers, I've CC'd a sexual email to my sons, right?
Guest:That's...
Marc:Show was about this it was it was a it was a is a heavy show and now it made me wonder about myself in terms of like cuz I've done shows like when my When my second wife left me yeah abruptly properly abruptly abruptly all right.
Marc:Yeah, okay.
Marc:I had it coming so
Marc:But I was working on one person.
Marc:The only thing I could think to do was get on the stage and start workshopping something.
Marc:And the people that saw it, it was in the basement.
Marc:I remember it was in the basement of a theater, in a smaller theater, and upstairs, Mike Birbiglia was having a hit run of his show.
Marc:So it was just like, it was exactly where my career was.
Marc:It was like, fuck that guy, and I'm in the basement doing the real work.
Marc:And...
Marc:So I was talking about this woman leaving me, and it was still happening.
Marc:And it was meant to be a workshop.
Marc:But I realized that it wasn't really a show.
Marc:It was just I needed to get it out to rooms full of strangers so they could live with it.
Marc:And it wasn't meant to be reviewed.
Marc:And someone from Time Out came, and they were like, you know, this show is very interesting.
Marc:It's very raw.
Marc:It almost seems like Maren's not really worked this stuff through.
LAUGHTER
Marc:So it's a little hard to watch, but it was very engaging.
Marc:Did she come and see the show?
Marc:That woman, dude, she doesn't, I can't even explain it.
Marc:No, she did not come see the show.
Marc:She does not listen to my show.
Marc:The bane of her existence is the fact that if you Google her name, people also looked for me.
Marc:She hates me, fine, whatever.
Marc:So my question to you, because I thought about this.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Was like, we both do this.
Marc:We both have, you know, my parents very selfish, very, you know, emotionally incapable of parenting, really.
Marc:But you seem to come out all right.
Marc:I can only assume it's because of Britain and sports.
Marc:So... Sports.
Marc:Yes, I mean, you know, there's the sort of cultural repressive nature, but also the fact that you understand healthy competition.
Marc:I don't engage with sports at all.
Marc:For me, everything is, you know, kind of like personal.
Marc:Like, I couldn't play soccer because if I kicked it badly, I'd be like, oh, you're all fucking assholes.
Marc:You don't really like me.
Marc:So...
Guest:Yeah, but I I do play football, but I when you say I seem to have come out all right I would say we've come out almost exactly the same I didn't I didn't I did not write I didn't write nine books.
Guest:How do you write nine books?
Guest:Yeah, that's kind of a slightly mad manic thing So you definitely cut so my mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, right?
Guest:My dad was a guy who constantly constantly worried about money.
Guest:He was a working-class Welsh bloke and
Guest:who had a brief period when he earned a bit of money work for Unilever and then was made redundant.
Guest:When he was made redundant, he got so crazy about money, we couldn't have friends back in case they ate some toast.
Guest:He would actually say they might eat some toast, right?
Guest:And they were unbelievable.
Guest:So I think the reason I write nine books is I am actually kind of okay, but a part of me thinks, no, I'm not.
Guest:Any second now, it's going to go away because either my dad will say that's not real or the Nazis will take it.
Marc:Yeah, that Nazi thing.
Marc:Well, we're jumping around.
Marc:Because when I saw your show and then I saw your clothing, for me it was sort of like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:In the sense of like, this isn't a Jewish thing.
Marc:And then you're like a year younger than me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I get I get the it's like I was trying to figure out what is the emotional component that makes us one, you know, talk about our Jewishness constantly just to make people annoyed with Jews to like have like these, you know, kind of like, you know, spinning brains about bullshit.
Marc:It's it's is it a Jewish thing?
Guest:Well, I I actually don't think that I talk about Jewishness in order to make people annoyed.
Guest:Or at least if they are annoyed, what I'm doing is saying, why are you fucking annoyed?
Guest:Why are you annoyed about me talking about being Jewish?
Guest:When you might not be annoyed about anyone else.
Guest:I mean, obviously fucking racists are annoyed about Richard Pryor talking about being black.
Guest:But generally people are not annoyed about that.
Guest:I get sort of stop talking about being Jewish from people who are not in their own minds racist.
Marc:But that's what you're looking, but that's what you're provoking in order to find that, to start that conversation.
Guest:Well, I was always, I was going to say this like half an hour ago, but I was always really out about being Jewish.
Guest:Without any doubt, increasing anti-Semitism and my sense of increasing anti-Semitism has made me more out about being Jewish.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:I want to talk about it more.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Why do you think?
Marc:Just to draw attention to it?
Guest:There is an element of fuck you to that, I guess.
Guest:But there is also an element of...
Guest:What are you gonna do about it?
Guest:What are you gonna do?
Guest:You've got people wanting to shut down their historical precedents.
Marc:Yeah
Marc:Well, yeah, I mean, I'm in the same boat as that.
Marc:Well, the other, this is what leading into your book, like my last girlfriend before, Lynn, who I was with five years, the painter.
Guest:Right.
Marc:She, like when Trump got elected, you know, we were in, we had taken a vacation, you know, the day he went into office.
Marc:I don't know what I was thinking.
Marc:And he started doing that kind of fascist theater, signing things in the Oval Office.
Marc:And I was like, we're fucked.
Marc:I'm a Jew, and this is going to go down.
Marc:And this woman, and she's a progressive, said to me, she goes, I don't think you're first on the list.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And I'm like, yeah, but we're on the list.
Guest:You're on the fucking list.
Guest:So...
Guest:You're always on the fucking list.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But it did make me sort of like, which is really a big point in your book.
Marc:It made me realize, like, you know, this is happening to Latin American immigrants now.
Marc:There was, at that time, a fairly real Gestapo set up to, you know, to kind of put people in trucks and take them to camps.
Marc:So it did make me realize, like, well, don't be so selfish and backseat the implicit anti-Semitism that is in fascism.
Marc:And also in America, we have no real functioning left that has any solidarity or any focus.
Marc:We just have a very active two-party system, and one of the parties is just shamelessly fucking fascist.
Marc:And so with her saying that, my problem is it's like maybe she's right, but then all I'm thinking is how long does it take to put that infrastructure in place?
Guest:Not that long.
Guest:I know.
Guest:Not that long.
Guest:Like historical precedence, not very long at all.
Guest:And also, he was signing executive orders in his big, fat, stupid way.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's what he was doing.
Guest:I never really understood it because I don't know that much.
Guest:It was all theater.
Guest:About American lawmaking, but it was as if I've signed it so it happens, but then it doesn't.
Marc:Well, he's like a genetic autocrat.
Marc:The guy, like, you know, a lot of people think, like, you know, he's stupid or he's, you know, it's all impulsive.
Marc:But, you know, he's a very, like, he knows exactly what he wants to be.
Marc:And now with the tide and culture turning, it's fucking creepy, dude.
Marc:I mean, I, you know, I've applied for permanent residency in Canada just to, in my mind, to have a plan in place because you don't want to be the... You've watched a lot of movies where people in America, in dysfunctional, dystopian America, escape to Canada.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They're always escaping to Canada.
Guest:It's close, and they don't talk funny.
Guest:Even in American Pickle, Seth Rogen's quite weird film about being Jewish.
Marc:He's Canadian.
Guest:Yeah, okay, so he's returning to the land of his father.
Marc:For me, it wasn't even – it's not like I'm going to give up my citizenship.
Marc:I just was like – I was thinking about Ireland for some reason.
Marc:I was sort of like, oh, the Irish get it.
Marc:You know, they're sad and poetic, you know, and I think it's beautiful there.
Guest:But you're an American who won't have Irish roots.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Because you're Jewish.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So you'll have to go back to Lithuania, won't you?
Guest:That's where you'll have to go back.
Marc:No, Belarus.
Guest:That's not good.
Guest:You don't want to go to Belarus.
Marc:No, you don't want to go to Belarus.
Marc:It's like Ukraine and Belarus, buddy.
Marc:That's my background.
Marc:Ukraine and Belarus.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Not the best time.
Guest:Yeah, me too, actually.
Guest:It is?
Guest:I think it's, yeah, Ukraine, Lithuania.
Guest:That's my dad.
Guest:This kind of thing.
Marc:Poland.
Marc:Got a little Poland, but it's unclear because the borders moved around.
Guest:Yeah, it's very unclear.
Guest:It's always unclear.
Guest:But as far as I can make out from the no clarity is that my great-great-grandfather was, because it's always fleeing, right?
Guest:So there were pogroms.
Guest:They were Nazi refugees on my mum's side, but on my dad's side, great-great-grandfather is fleeing from Russian pogroms in Lithuania or Vilnius or whatever.
Guest:He gets on a boat.
Guest:This is what I was always told.
Guest:He smuggles himself on a boat.
Guest:He doesn't speak any English or anything.
Guest:He thinks he's going to New York.
Guest:The boat stops to refuel at Swansea.
Guest:Seriously, he gets off.
Guest:Ten years later, I assume he has enough English to say, where is the Statue of Liberty?
LAUGHTER
Guest:Really?
Guest:They didn't mean to be in Swansea.
Guest:Why would they be in Swansea?
Guest:But that's what happened.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:I actually know a lot about my family because I did Finding Your Roots, the TV show.
Guest:Yeah, I did Who Do You Think You Are, which is maybe the same thing.
Marc:But Finding Your Roots, they have a team in place that went to... They tracked my father's lineage back into the Pale of Settlement.
Marc:The Pale of Settlement.
Guest:That is where Fiddler on the Roof is actually set.
Guest:That is very Jewish.
Guest:Well done.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Muzzle tov.
Guest:Yeah, a tailor.
Marc:A tailor.
Marc:He was a tailor.
Marc:A tailor.
Guest:Was he actually doing a musical?
Marc:Weren't they all?
Marc:That's so funny, because I was recently... I get in trouble for being... Should we just do the dance together, like with the cross-legged thing?
Marc:I get in trouble for being anti-Semitic against Hasidim.
Marc:Like I get that to you every time every time I say something like I said, you know fck You know why e on Twitter?
Marc:That was my last tweet.
Marc:Just fuck Kanye, you know, right and in some like, you know progressive Zionist dude is you know pulls up a quote from a a Something I said about the Chassids being you know sort of I said they're so genetically tight as a community They don't even if they didn't have the outfits you wouldn't know they were Jews and
Marc:So, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:No, I agree with that.
Marc:I got into trouble.
Guest:I got into trouble.
Guest:I don't even should mention this because I got very angry about it, but fuck yeah.
Guest:So during COVID, you may know this, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know about COVID.
Guest:What's happened, right?
Guest:Yeah, COVID happened.
Guest:You've got a bit weird.
Guest:It's a real thing.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So during COVID, there was a thing where the Orthodox Jewish communities were not disregarding COVID.
Guest:Yeah, because they needed to pray in certain ways.
Guest:And so that was spreading COVID.
Guest:So I wrote on Twitter, stupid fucking Frummers.
Guest:Now, Frummers, for anyone who doesn't know, is what Jews call Orthodox Jews.
Guest:And I thought that makes it clear to anyone reading this, I'm Jewish.
Guest:So I can kind of say this about these people.
Guest:But hey, no, it caused a lot of fuss.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, a lot of fuss.
Guest:I had to meet with a frumer.
Marc:Oh, really?
Guest:Like, yeah, I'd have a public meeting with a fucking frumer to talk through it all, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I just find that, you know, the whole insulated community, sort of, you know, the genetic lines and the sort of homeschooling, and it's like, it's disturbing to me, but they get very mad because they see, they believe they are the Jews doing the repopulating post-Holocaust and that they are preparing and making sure that it's never going to happen again.
Marc:I don't know if that's true, really.
Marc:I mean, how many people are Chabad really bringing in with their trucks?
Marc:I don't know if they have those here.
Marc:But in New York, they just drive around these trucks and they make you do tefillin.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:They'll just drag you into a Jew, Jewish, Jewish.
Marc:And they'll drag you into a truck and make you do tefillin, even if you don't know what's happening.
Marc:And then they just throw you back onto the street.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And you just sit there forced to question who you are in the world.
Guest:You know what, Mark?
Guest:They'll never spot us.
Marc:But I think my point was, like, I recently was, and I told this story, I think, on the podcast maybe, but I was renting a car in New York, and it was late at night, and I was walking into this rental place, because the story's about them not having cars, but there was an Orthodox, a Hasidic guy at the counter, like, you know, gesticulating madly.
Marc:And in my mind, I'm like, that could be excitement, or he's mad.
Marc:You know, like, he might be like, I love my car!
Marc:You know, like, but...
Guest:Because they're a bit, yeah.
Marc:They like to dance.
Marc:That's what you're saying.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:It was me being anti-Semitic again.
Marc:It was just sort of like, look, he's dancing.
Guest:But is that anti-Semitic?
Guest:I mean, it kind of is.
Guest:But is it anti-Semitic or is it just like making fun of those guys?
Marc:No, I turned the corner and there was like, you know six kids, you know from age three to like 16 and a woman who looked exhausted Yeah, exhausted from just having just like she had like this look in her eye just completely Stockholm syndrome is my projection Okay, and she was pregnant again, and it was the saddest looking pregnancy I'd ever seen in my life Did she have helped me written on her shot on her rig?
Marc:Yeah
Marc:Well, that's the thing.
Marc:I thought, like, I can save her.
Marc:This is my moment.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:Yeah, I can pull her away from this.
Guest:That's who your third wife should be.
Marc:Right.
Marc:That woman.
Marc:I would get the car.
Marc:I'd throw her in it.
Marc:I'd call my mother.
Marc:I'm like, I'm marrying a Jew.
Marc:She's in the car, and we're already having a child.
Guest:She's a big Jew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, finally.
Guest:My first wife.
Guest:Have you not been with a Jewish woman?
Marc:My first wife was a Jew.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Oh, God, you look actually ill.
Yeah.
Marc:I wrote the worst joke in the world about that and I loved it.
Marc:What was the joke?
Marc:The joke was, you know, I was married to a Jewish woman and the problem with marrying a Jew is that everything you hated about going home is now in your house.
Guest:Can I tell you something about, so my wife, who I'm... I feel like I'm going to cry.
Guest:My wife is a woman called Malwena Banks, who is a Catholic.
Guest:She's of Catholic background, and she's quite well known, possibly because she is the voice of Mummy Pig from Peppa Pig, which is complicated for a Jewish bloke, to be honest with you.
Guest:Especially if you eat all those full English breakfasts.
Guest:Yes, yes, yes.
Guest:But the Catholic thing is interesting because Frank Skinner, who I do a lot of work with, is also Catholic.
Marc:This is your third comedy partner?
Guest:It's my... kind of, yeah.
Guest:I've had quite a few.
Guest:I like to think of you as my third comedy partner.
Marc:I think it's going well.
Marc:Yeah, it's going well.
Guest:But I think...
Guest:I don't know how you get on with Catholics in America, but I think that Catholics are a little bit like Jews.
Guest:In Britain, there's something different about them.
Guest:Something not obviously different about them, maybe, but is different.
Guest:And that difference is enough to make them feel marked in some way.
Guest:In the way that I think Anglicans, I don't really know what an Anglican is, but they don't feel like they're just the wallpaper of this country.
Marc:Catholics have a dirty, weird history.
Marc:And...
Marc:And it's complicated dude.
Marc:I mean you I mean I went I've been to Rome you go into every church.
Marc:There's just fucking dead wizards everywhere That's Harry Potter.
Marc:I think he's the same thing.
Marc:It's a thing.
Marc:Yeah, what smoking orbs, you know, like fucking the robes and the hats these pieces of
Marc:saints and dead.
Marc:How many fucking popes were there?
Marc:If you go to Italy, it's like every church you go in, it's like there's nine popes buried in the wall.
Marc:And you're like, how long has this been going on for?
Marc:They do fucking, they love dead shit.
Guest:It's total witchcraft, dude.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that's the same with the Jews.
Marc:We're kind of witchy, too.
Guest:No, we're not as witchy.
Guest:Because I think the thing about Jews, the thing about the religion, because I'm an atheist.
Guest:Are you an atheist?
Marc:Yeah, you know.
Marc:But, you know, yes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Glad we've worked that out.
Guest:Because I think the religion is such a fucking weird religion.
Guest:The religion is not... Which one are we talking about?
Guest:Jews?
Guest:Judaism.
Guest:I had to say it in a weird way.
Guest:Judaism.
Guest:I don't know why.
Guest:It's kind of like just a sort of OCD thing.
Guest:It's not really about God.
Guest:It's not really even about an afterlife.
Guest:That's the whole point of religion is an afterlife.
Guest:That's the racket.
Guest:That's the racket of religion.
Guest:Yeah, that's the bait and switch is an afterlife.
Guest:Everything's going to be amazing when you're
Guest:Dead!
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:But we don't even have that.
Guest:No.
Guest:Jews don't have a heaven.
Guest:They don't have it.
Guest:What we have is 614 mitzvot, things you're meant to do, things you're meant to wind around your arm, lights that you're meant to switch on or switch off at certain times of the day or night, candles you're meant to light, things you're supposed to say.
Guest:It's OCD.
Marc:Of course it is.
Marc:I used to actually do a bit about that, that any sort of ritual is your spirituality.
Marc:If you go back and check the gas nine times and then count the steps and back back up, that's a full day.
Marc:It does keep things organized.
Marc:It's faith.
Guest:That's like a religious Jew.
Marc:I think so, but when I'm checking the gas, it's really just fear of fire.
Marc:I think when you're doing the thing around your arm, you're fear of God.
Marc:I guess it's similar.
Guest:It's the same thing.
Guest:He appeared as a fire at one point, not in your house.
Guest:In a bush.
Guest:In a bush.
Guest:It's all fear.
Guest:That's the point.
Marc:But the thing I liked about Jews, though, is it seemed like they were always in conversation.
Marc:It doesn't seem like these other religions are talking as much to God.
Marc:It seems like most of the old Jews are sort of like, what?
Guest:What do you want?
Marc:When am I supposed to do that?
Marc:Now?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, that's right.
Guest:The Talmud is just really a long, long conversation.
Guest:In fact, there's a woman called Dara Horn who's written a brilliant book called People Love Dead Jews.
Guest:There was a round of applause for Dara Horn.
Guest:She's great.
Guest:It's a great book.
Guest:But she ends up talking about how she so can't bear the amount of anti-Semitism that is out there that she just starts reading the Talmud.
Guest:And then she slightly upends that by saying it's a bit like Twitter.
Guest:I think like, well, quite a lot of antisemitism on that.
Guest:But that's what it, because she says it's just like scrolls and scrolls and scrolls of people arguing with each other.
Guest:Except not about trans politics, but about whether or not you should like start the Shabbos at six o'clock or six minutes.
Guest:Which shoe do I put on first?
Guest:Yeah, which shoe do I put on first?
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:What does Hashem say about whether David's shoes or Mark's shoes are more pointy?
Marc:Hashem!
Marc:Hashem!
Guest:You see, I could see the pale of settlement in you when you did that.
Guest:Small part of you if you got offered have you been offered the part of like of a Jew Yentl in anything No, I would do that.
Guest:Yeah, I would do that.
Guest:Yeah, we need to play actually normally as I point out my book It's normally some big fucking guy who yes that yeah, yeah normally a big yoke I'm using these words.
Guest:Yeah, right?
Guest:They just mean non-jews in this slightly derogatory way as we know that's normally given to someone who isn't but we
Guest:You know, if Yentl is remade, if Fiddler is remade, if we're not too old, it should come to us.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We could probably... Thank you.
Marc:Thank you very much.
Marc:We're going to be in Fiddler.
Marc:That's what you just fought for.
Marc:That's what nine people applauded.
Marc:You do deserve to both be Tevye's at the same time.
Marc:The Tevye twins.
Marc:But in your book, it's very interesting to me.
Marc:I learned a lot about the book.
Marc:It's very provocative.
Marc:Because it's structured differently.
Marc:The government's structured differently here in the conversations.
Marc:you know, much different here about it.
Marc:But the sort of idea that, you know, anti-Semitism is not acknowledged enough on the left because there are more, you know, sort of relevant isms to the movement is very interesting to me.
Marc:And I don't know how we reconcile that because it eventually.
Marc:What do we do?
Guest:Well, firstly, how many people listen to this podcast?
Guest:Well, like millions and millions, right?
Guest:Eventually.
Guest:Okay, so the book is called Jews Don't Count, because you haven't said that, and fucking hell, why am I doing this, right?
LAUGHTER
Guest:And yes, it's about the fact that generally I perceive that antisemitism and indeed Jewish identity and inclusion and representation is low in the mix.
Guest:And actually, when I wrote the book in 2020, I really felt that.
Guest:And I still feel it.
Guest:There's an interesting moment when Kanye did his thing.
Guest:What, in the last week?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Last week, yeah.
Guest:It was an interesting thing because there was quite a big reaction to it.
Guest:And I was kind of... In general.
Guest:In general, on the internet, it felt to me like he was called out and whatever.
Guest:But now he just keeps saying that shit and people aren't bothered now.
Guest:Like he just keeps saying it.
Marc:The doubling down thing is part of the whole sort of MAGA manic trip.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But I think it's partly because I saw him say there's a very typical thing with anti-Semitism.
Guest:He was on a podcast the other day.
Guest:Did you see it?
Guest:Just doubling down.
Guest:And then he started talking again about how Jews control this and how Jews control black music and Jews control whatever.
Guest:And then he says, you know, I respect the Jewish people for this.
Guest:And here's a big problem, which is this notion that Jewish success...
Guest:which is always parlayed as basically Jewish control, Jewish basically hands over the world, is somehow like, it's not offensive to say that, because it means that we're just complimenting Jews.
Guest:No, you're not.
Guest:Because historically, that shit leads to Jewish houses being burned down.
Guest:Because the notion is not, hey, we're celebrating Jewish wealth.
Guest:Well done, the Jews.
Guest:Aren't they amazing?
Guest:Amazing well the Jews well done big on them No, it's fucking they must have got it by ill-gotten means because they're Jewish and they've got secret societies or whatever right Let's take that money back sure and like history shows that over and over again Yeah, so I guess what's the timeline on this?
Guest:What should we go now?
Marc:No.
Marc:Is that what you're saying?
Marc:I have a truck here.
Guest:We should flee somewhere now.
Guest:I don't know these people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They'll take us in.
Guest:Some of them will take us in.
Guest:They'll hide us in attics.
Guest:It'll be okay.
Guest:I don't know what the timeline is.
Marc:You don't know what the timeline is?
Guest:But the basic point is that the right wing, the far right, is getting louder and louder.
Guest:You mentioned the thing about the Jews will not replace us.
Guest:Do people even know what that is in here?
Guest:Do you know?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So a lot of people don't.
Guest:When I first saw it,
Guest:I saw all these fucking like right-wing mad American people with torches chanting the Jew will not replace us I thought absolutely not I don't want to be you that would be terrible I thought like you know we're not gonna out fuck these people and if we did who would want those jobs no exactly who would want to look like them but it turns out it turns out people don't oh hello
Guest:What's the difference between the right and the far right?
Marc:Interesting that he decided it was question and answer time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:One is worse than the other.
Guest:Is it?
Guest:Really?
Guest:Is it question and answer?
Guest:Or should I just keep going with what I was saying?
Marc:I don't know the tone of him.
Guest:So why don't you... I know the tone of him.
Marc:And it frightens me.
Marc:I just don't know how far it's going to go.
Guest:No, okay.
Guest:Well, the great replacement theory, which is not, I think, as well known in this country as maybe it is in America, is the idea is, which I didn't really understand, is not that Jews will be replacing...
Guest:sort of white Christian people, but the Jews are secretly masterminding immigration and multiculturalism in order to undermine the Aryan white race.
Marc:It's part of the communist socialist conspiracy that's been put forth by the Soros Colossus.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:Which is a mythological creature that's bigger than the planet Earth.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And the actual George Soros is just the penis of the Soros Colossus.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Although I like the idea... It's part of the QAnon thing.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I can't validate it.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:I like the idea that the Soros... It's sad how many people took it seriously.
Guest:Oh, I liked it.
Guest:Go ahead.
Guest:Yeah, I know it's not worth saying now, but I think the Soros Colossus sounds like a prog rock band.
Guest:That's what I think.
Marc:But yeah, I guess my concern is ultimately, and I panic about it all the time, I don't know how much you actually panic about it, but you start to realize in America that because so many norms were disrupted and so many of them aren't holding in terms of basic law and order, that attacks that happen seemingly isolated or spontaneous against Jews or any other religion,
Marc:are sort of part of a pattern that will only get worse.
Marc:I fear in America that these things will keep being identified, not as specifically as hate crimes as they should be, just as these acts, random acts.
Marc:And I feel like it's sort of starting there.
Marc:I feel like our law and order system is mildly breaking down.
Marc:How is it here?
Guest:Well, I don't know if you've watched the news recently in Britain, but things are not quite right here at the moment.
Guest:I just read before I came on.
Guest:Did anyone see this?
Guest:In this new bill, they're doing a bill on fracking right at the moment.
Guest:Apparently the Tory whips, that's not actual whips.
Guest:Those are people who get people to vote.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We're having to, like, force people... Did you read this?
Guest:Force people into the chamber to actually vote.
Guest:Jacob Rees-Monk, who's like a cosplay Lord Snooty guy, right?
Guest:He looks like a haunted pencil.
Guest:LAUGHTER
Guest:He was apparently like pushing people in I mean he hardly looks like he can actually stand up But he was pushing and it's just something is really going wrong You know Liz Truss who is so out of her depth that you see her and you want to call the Royal National Lifeboat Association like straight away It's just like why you can't it's not clear
Guest:why she's Prime Minister.
Guest:I don't want to explain the really boring system, but she got there because basically 80,000 Tory members mistook her for Margaret Thatcher.
Guest:Like, she's back!
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That's as far as I can make out.
Guest:That's what they thought.
Guest:She looks a bit like, you know.
Marc:So we're all in trouble.
Guest:Yeah, it's all in trouble.
Guest:But one of the things, the thing I was going to say is that the far right are on the rise.
Guest:They always have Jews in their sights.
Guest:It's always, however much they're attacking other minorities, Jews are always kind of really at the center of what they're talking about.
Guest:Even people who go on, like white supremacists who go on these massive, horrible sprees, they leave manifestos, 70 pages of which are about fucking Jews.
Marc:But it's such old stuff.
Marc:It's these mythological ideas that Jews somehow run the world secretly.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Yeah, but that is shared on right and left.
Guest:That's the problem.
Guest:It's shared on right and left, so that when the far right is on the rise, the left are kind of, with Jews, kind of keen to downplay it a bit.
Guest:So, for example, I read, that's another thing that Dara Horn says, but when two religious Jews were killed in New Jersey a while back, all the kind of progressive press didn't really report it as a hate crime.
Guest:They said, oh, well, yeah, maybe there was quite a lot of gentrification in this area.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And similarly, when 11 Jews were killed in Pittsburgh in this country, a woman called Dame Jenny Tong, who used to be a liberal Democrat MP.
Guest:So again, on the left, she said, yeah, this is terrible.
Guest:But what about what's happening in Israel?
Guest:Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:So it's always like Jews can't be victims.
Guest:It's a weird idea that like the Jesus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How Jewish was he?
Guest:We don't know.
Guest:We just don't know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or he took the victimhood for the rest of us.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's the thing.
Guest:Sure did.
Guest:Fucking Jesus.
Guest:Jesus.
Guest:That guy, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he gets taken away quite a lot.
Guest:His Jewishness gets taken away.
Marc:Yeah, I think we should get it back.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Maybe that's what we should be doing.
Marc:It's just really celebrating the Jewishness.
Guest:Then you become a Jew for Jesus.
Guest:And they are cunts.
Guest:I look forward to being cancelled by Jews for Jesus.
Guest:That would be great.
Guest:That's a weird cult, those guys.
Marc:It is.
Guest:Why bother?
Guest:Anyway, sorry.
Guest:Why bother with Jesus?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Why bother with like if you're a Jew and like the Jesus?
Guest:That's the whole thing.
Marc:You know, David, people are confused.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And they want to believe in something and it's causing all the fucking problems.
Marc:Yeah, it's just this innate desire to believe in something that implies some bigger order or gives your life some definition I mean D I it's totally fucking crazy.
Marc:Mmm And it's a problem when you are sort of an atheist person or a secular person and you kind of you know You try to keep your brain as clean as possible You know I realize it didn't sound like you were trying to keep your brain as clean as possible when you were picking glass out of cocaine
Marc:Oh no, that was clear.
Guest:That was going clear like a Scientologist.
Guest:You just get that brain going, man.
Marc:You get it, dude.
Marc:You get it.
Marc:No, but I just think it's either you live with the reality that we're in, which I think...
Marc:we're trying to do, which is terrifying, or you go in some other direction with your belief system, which can be frightening or completely ignorant.
Marc:But I don't know why I'm trying to say all that other than I don't know really what to do, do you, other than just speak out?
Guest:I don't even really do any speaking out in terms of like this has got an end point I don't have an end point right say what I see yeah right and so I saw it seemed to me that anti-semitism and Jewish identity and whatever was low in the mix yeah of maybe the actual people that I kind of hang out with yeah the people that I sort of think like these are the like-minded people these are the protective people yeah
Guest:They seem to be less bothered about it.
Guest:So I saw it and I wanted to talk about it.
Guest:And then people say to me things like, oh, so do you want Jews to have the same kind of trigger whatever for offense?
Guest:Do you want it all to be, you know, like the same thing?
Guest:And I don't know.
Guest:I'm just pointing it out.
Guest:And wherever it goes is where it goes.
Marc:Yeah, we just don't want to be killed.
Guest:Yeah, we just don't want to be killed.
Guest:I don't actually want to die.
Guest:No, I don't either.
Guest:That's a problem, because even if we're not killed, that will happen.
Guest:Yeah, that's going to happen no matter what.
Marc:And I'm really unkeen on it.
Marc:Yeah, I'd rather do that on my own.
Guest:Die?
Marc:Yeah, as opposed to have somebody else do it for me.
Guest:Oh, yeah, no, I'd rather do it on my own, but I'd rather it didn't happen at all.
Guest:I know it's going to happen.
Guest:Can we... Talk about cats?
Guest:Yeah, well, I want to talk about cats, because...
Guest:We are very similar in a lot of ways, and it is weird that also you're obsessed with cats, I think.
Marc:It came to me later in life.
Marc:Oh, did it?
Marc:A little bit.
Marc:I mean, I grew up with dogs, but they're just too needy, and I resent them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So... I can see how that would... But what you said about women and other things that you might... Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up.
Marc:Am will not allow that connection to be no, I'm not making that because it's about you.
Marc:It's about me.
Marc:Yeah Well, no, no, I just I find that if I want to be the neediest thing in my house, okay But you are happy to supply the needs of cats because I like cats because
Guest:Do you actually have a feral load?
Guest:How many do you have?
Marc:Well, I had several.
Marc:There was a feral crew that I rescued in Queens without knowing what I was getting into.
Marc:There was all these kittens in the back of my apartment when I lived in New York, and they were already going through the garbage and feeding themselves.
Marc:I had no idea that that means that, well, it's over.
Marc:You're not going to make a cute cat out of that.
Marc:So I trapped four of them in shoeboxes, and I brought them up into my apartment in Queens, and it was a fucking disaster.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, one of them went behind the fridge, one of them climbed up between the screen and a window, one of them got stuck on a glue trap and started flopping around.
Marc:And then I couldn't get them out of the house because I didn't know where they were.
Marc:They destroyed the entire house.
Guest:So I had a similar situation, because I had three cats, and then my dad died, and I took in his cat, and that cat was the half-sister of the other three cats, or the mother was there, and the two brothers, but she hadn't seen them for 10 years.
Guest:And I thought, I've known cats for a long time, but I still thought, there'll be some family affection.
Guest:It'll be like, surprise, surprise, or long-lost families.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I've missed that episode of Long Lost Families where they all hiss at each other and then claw at each other and then hide under the kitchen.
Guest:Yeah, how long did it go on for?
Guest:No, they still won't live together.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, they're in my house, but they have to be in separate parts of the house.
Guest:Otherwise, they just go...
Guest:for ages and ages.
Guest:What is that?
Guest:I've done it.
Guest:I've done that, so I've never told anyone this.
Guest:So Zelda, who is that cat, hisses so often that eventually I thought, what if I hiss at her?
Guest:That might stop her.
Guest:She just looked so freaked out by it.
Guest:Oh, you did?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:I went...
Guest:Did it work?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:She just looked freaked out and then immediately looked at the other cat and hissed at them.
Guest:It was like I was training her.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I don't understand them, but from that four in Queens, I had two for like 16 years.
Marc:Oh, wow.
Marc:They went.
Marc:And then I had another one show up at my house, the black one, Buster.
Marc:He just showed up to eat out of the bowl that I put out for the ferals I was feeding at the old house.
Marc:And he was young, and I don't know, we grabbed him, got him fixed up, and he's a great cat, has kidney problems.
Guest:I'm sad to hear the kidney problems.
Guest:Let me tell you a story.
Guest:So the cat name that I'm very proud of, I used to live with Frank Skinner, one of my double-act partners, and together we came up with this name for a cat, which was Chairman Meow.
Guest:which I still think is the best name for a cat ever, right?
Marc:Well, you had a monkey, though, too.
Marc:I had a monkey.
Guest:I don't have a monkey.
Guest:Oh, sorry.
Guest:I have a cat called Monkey.
Guest:Yeah, me too.
Guest:Sorry, I thought you meant, do I have a monkey?
Guest:Yeah, I had a monkey.
Guest:I had a cat called Monkey, but I had Chairman Meow.
Guest:Yeah, Chairman Meow.
Guest:Anyway, I was really proud of the name, and I went with Chairman Meow to the vet when he had, actually, she had kidney problems.
Guest:She was a she, Chairman Meow.
Guest:And I gave, just to the receptionist, I told the receptionist the name of the cat, people leaving, they don't want to hear stuff about ill cats, fair enough.
Guest:Chairman, I said the name of the cat is Chairman Meow, right?
Guest:And the receptionist just wrote down on her computer, Meow.
Guest:Just like her surname, right?
Guest:Which meant that when I went through to the actual vet and the vet got the name of the cat up on the computer, I could tell he was thinking, what a shit, unoriginal name for a cat.
Guest:Meow.
Guest:You're a comedian.
Guest:Couldn't you do better than that?
Guest:And let me tell you, a real thing happened with that cat, which is an amazing thing, right?
Guest:So she did that thing, which I don't know if your feral cats do, of just going to other houses to eat.
Guest:Oh, yeah, when I used to wear them.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So this woman called Carolina used to live near me.
Guest:She just basically took Chairman Meow in.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then eventually she got a collar for Chairman Meow because she didn't have a collar.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But she decided because she knew that it was my cat to put like not Chairman Meow on it, but David.
Guest:David with my phone number, right?
Guest:My phone number.
Guest:So for years, I was convinced that one day my wife would get a phone call saying, I'm afraid David's been in a road accident.
Guest:he's in a bin bag should we just hit him with a shovel right because he was shitting in my garden for ages so anyway this i honestly but i i you said about about taking the cats i mean i honestly when i took monkey to the vet and had to put it i've had like 30 cats in my life i've never actually had to put one yeah over the course of my life i've probably been but all of them have had the grace to die in ways that meant i don't have to pay for it did you find them
Guest:Monkey.
Marc:No, the ones that died.
Guest:The ones that died.
Guest:You know this thing that sometimes cats, chairman did this, chairman meow.
Guest:They'll just kind of go up the mountain like old Japanese people.
Guest:Do you have mountains here?
Guest:No, I mean they'll go up the spiritual mountain.
Marc:So they just go die in a sewer somewhere.
Guest:They go die somewhere because they realize it's their time.
Marc:Under a car.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But monkey I had to actually take the vet.
Guest:And my daughter will tell you she has never seen me cry so much.
Guest:Oh, it's the worst.
Guest:Like when my mum died and my dad, nothing like that.
Guest:Did you have them put down as well?
Guest:I had them put down, yeah.
Guest:I did.
Guest:Good for you.
Guest:It was the best thing to do.
Guest:It was definitely the best thing to do.
Marc:I had to do that.
Marc:I did that with Monkey and his sister La Fonda who died about six months apart.
Marc:But it's a decision you make.
Marc:I knew that I had to do it.
Marc:Because you can just drop them off and stuff.
Marc:Drop them off where?
Marc:At the vet.
Marc:You don't have to go into the room.
Marc:Oh, no, I know.
Guest:Like I went into the room.
Guest:No, I did that.
Guest:I did too.
Guest:There was one really extraordinary moment if you had this.
Guest:So I take Monkey in, right?
Guest:And I'm upset.
Guest:I'm incredibly upset.
Guest:And, you know, I got him out the little box.
Guest:He started purring.
Guest:Oh, the worst.
Guest:He started purring.
Guest:And then the vet said, would you like to be alone with him for like a couple of minutes?
Guest:And I kind of thought, fucking no, I can't handle this.
Guest:But I did.
Guest:I did.
Guest:He hung out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, God, it was so awful.
Guest:Then weirdly, after he was dead, I took a photo of him.
Guest:That was kind of weird, like a selfie.
Guest:But I wanted to send it to my wife, who wasn't there, to sort of share in this moment.
Marc:I went in there with both of them, and, you know, you just sort of, you hold them, right?
Marc:And the doctor does it.
Marc:The two shots, was it the two shots?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:One puts them in a sweep.
Guest:Yeah, and then another one kills them.
Marc:I can't.
Marc:I want to believe that's the right thing to do, you know, to be there with them.
Marc:But, you know, it doesn't feel great to me right now.
Guest:No, but it's not for you.
Guest:It's for the cat, isn't it?
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Kidding.
Guest:Actually, I do honestly would like to think that Monkey was comforted in some way.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:I mean, I think they trust you.
Guest:Yeah, me personally.
Marc:Well, no, the cats trust you and they figure, this is okay, he's here.
Guest:Yeah, but that's part of the problem.
Guest:I know!
Guest:That's my point!
Guest:Yeah, they trust you.
Guest:He started purring because he thought, yeah, I can hardly see at all as it happened.
Guest:But yeah, my owner is here.
Guest:It must be okay.
Guest:And that's part of what makes you feel bad about it.
Marc:But it's the best thing, dude.
Marc:No, I know it's the best thing.
Marc:I mean, fucking monkey was losing weight.
Marc:I had to give him all kinds of medicine.
Marc:It was hard to give him the medicine.
Marc:He wasn't happy.
Marc:Buster, the young one, was beating up on him.
Marc:It was a fucking nightmare.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But over the course of time, I had a lot of cats outside that, like one of them, wasn't even my cat, came to my house to die.
Guest:Did you administer an injection or he just sat there and died?
Marc:No, it was like at my old house there were several cats.
Guest:He thought it was the mountain.
Guest:He thought it was the cat mountain.
Marc:It was the cat mountain.
Marc:I had all these cats that used to hang around the old house.
Marc:I didn't know if they belonged to people or they were wild.
Marc:There was a deaf black cat that used to hang around my house.
Marc:I don't know how it lived outside.
Marc:It could not hear.
Marc:Could not hear.
Marc:Lived for over a decade before the coyotes got it.
Marc:It was like an amazing mythological creature.
Marc:And then there were all these other cats that hung around.
Marc:One of them got sick.
Marc:It was disgusting.
Marc:But I don't know if he was anyone's cat.
Marc:I took him to the vet and had him killed.
Guest:So then there was...
Guest:Shit.
Guest:Did it have David written on it?
Guest:On a collar?
Marc:Oh my god, it did.
Marc:And then the one that came to die at my house, I remember him hanging around once or twice, but I didn't see him for like seven years.
Marc:Where do you live?
Marc:Do you live in a cartoon?
Marc:I live in kind of like a hilly area in Los Angeles.
Marc:And there was a lot of wild cats and there was a lot of coyotes and there were just a lot of animals around.
Marc:But this guy came back.
Marc:When I saw him come back, he looked terrible.
Marc:And I'm like, oh my God, it's been like seven years, Odysseus.
Marc:And he just crawled.
Marc:He almost got under my house.
Marc:He just dropped dead.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:Just like, literally.
Marc:Yeah, but I felt, okay, well, maybe it's... Did you bury him?
Guest:No.
Guest:What, you just left him there?
Marc:No, I put him in a bag.
Guest:What, a bin liner?
Guest:Like a garbage bag?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, fair enough.
Guest:I didn't know him.
Guest:No, no, he wasn't.
Guest:He wasn't your cat.
Guest:Can you put a cat in the recycling or where does that go?
Guest:The regular garbage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:What?
Marc:What do you want from me?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I put it like the unknown cat grave on my property.
Marc:What's that headstone there?
Marc:That was a unknown soldier that came up injured.
Marc:I don't think we need to do a Q&A now that the problem people left.
Marc:Oh, is it them?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What time is it?
Guest:Have you had enough?
Guest:It's up to you.
Guest:It's your show.
Guest:We're just going to cut it.
Guest:What, the whole thing?
Marc:No.
Guest:We can have a question if you like.
Marc:Do we want to do the whole mic thing?
Marc:I can just repeat them.
Marc:Does anyone have one?
Guest:Anyone have a question?
Guest:You can raise your hand.
Guest:How did you leave your garage?
Marc:My garage?
Marc:I didn't make him.
Marc:He was the president, and yes, I made him.
Marc:I'm like, get that man to my garage!
Marc:I'm still in an actual garage.
Marc:It's just different than the garage.
Marc:I moved, and one of the reasons I bought the house that I'm in, aside from a slightly bigger house, and I didn't want to die in that 800-square-foot box that I had.
Marc:The old garage was great, but the one now is also in a garage.
Marc:It's just a nicer garage.
Marc:So I moved because a lot of things happened in that house, and I had made a little money, I'd saved a little money, and that house was falling apart.
Marc:And the idea of rebuilding that house caused me so much anxiety, I realized, like, why am I saving money?
Marc:I'm not married, I have no children, why don't I buy a new house?
Marc:So even though Obama came to that garage, it was not enough to keep me at that house.
Guest:You feel like you're a bit defensive about that garage.
Guest:I'm going to say garage, by the way.
Guest:I think it was the way she put it.
Guest:Well, I'm wondering if it was put in that way.
Guest:Like, why the fuck did you leave that garage?
Marc:I love that garage.
Guest:Obama came to that garage.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:It was practical.
Marc:And, yeah, Obama was there.
Marc:And Boomer, that was the weird thing about that cat.
Marc:Fucking Boomer, like, when my second wife left me,
Marc:I thought like, well, maybe I just needed to downsize to move into an apartment.
Marc:But I had that cat who lived outside.
Marc:I'm like, I can't move because Boomer lives outside.
Marc:And what am I going to do?
Marc:It was a real thought.
Marc:I worry about my cats every fucking night.
Marc:It's ridiculous.
Marc:I have three now.
Marc:I have Buster, Charlie, and Sammy.
Guest:Sammy.
Guest:Okay, someone told you who your cat was.
Marc:How have we got here?
Marc:I've been kind of a little hard on Sammy.
Marc:Have you?
Marc:Why?
Marc:Yeah, because I have Buster, who's like this black cat that is like intense.
Marc:And so Kit, my girlfriend, talked me into getting... Your girlfriend is called Kit?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's confusing.
Marc:She worked at the Animal Humane.
Guest:So she talked me into... She's not an actual cat, though?
Guest:No.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But she has three, two now.
Marc:Oh, she?
Marc:So she talked me into getting Sammy, who was a tiny little kitten.
Marc:And then you never know how they're going to turn out.
Marc:He's kind of a sluggo.
Marc:So Buster just kept beating up on Sammy.
Marc:It was terrible.
Marc:It was almost like I think Sammy could have been a different cat hadn't Buster.
Marc:He made him a submissive.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I think he's confused about it.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So which one's the submissive?
Guest:Buster's the dominant.
Marc:They're all men.
Marc:okay so what is that what do you call that what's the male version of dominatrix just a dominant man like I don't know what do they call them what what alpha pussy someone said no that's me I'm the alpha pussy that's an old bit of mine
Marc:No, I just feel like, you know, Sammy... Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marc:So now we got Charlie, a third one, a new kitten.
Marc:So now there's three.
Marc:And Sammy and Charlie seem to be bonding, and Sammy seems to be getting a little bit of his old spunk back.
Guest:Yeah, spunk means something else here.
Guest:His old joie de vivre.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Let's have another question.
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:That's a bit of a route one question for me.
Guest:So do you know what football's coming home, the concept of football's coming home, all that stuff?
Guest:Just take it.
Guest:Okay.
Okay.
Guest:I'm trying to bring you in, but you're so not interested in sports.
Guest:It's not going to happen.
Guest:As you said.
Guest:Actually, well, I will tell you one thing about it.
Guest:I'm going to tell you whether or not football is coming home, I don't fucking know as ever.
Guest:But one thing I can tell you, in case you don't know, is that the song, in fact, I can announce maybe on this show, although I don't know when this is going out.
Marc:The song that you wrote?
Guest:Well, we wrote footballs.
Guest:We wrote three lions.
Guest:Football's coming home.
Guest:It's gone to number one four times in this country.
Guest:There's a new version of it happening this Christmas, a Christmas version of it.
Guest:Yes, that is actually happening.
Guest:Two Jews media Brody and the Catholic Frank Skinner are doing a Christmas football song.
Guest:What about that?
Guest:But one of the things about that is odd about Three Lions going to number one a number of times is I have a terrible voice as everyone in this audience knows I can't actually sing and when it first came out I got insulted about that in a way that I think is the most extraordinary I'm sort of proud it's so insulting yeah Q magazine that at the time was like a big music magazine is
Guest:It said of it that in the future, it reviewed it, three lions will be thought of as better than it was.
Guest:In the future, it said folk memory will have erased the memory of David Baddiel's singing just as effectively as it has erased the memory of corpse robbers during the Blitz.
Guest:I didn't even fucking know there were corpse robbers during the Blitz, but I was sort of proud to be insulted on such a scale.
Guest:Great reference.
Marc:Yeah, it's a good reference.
Guest:Historical and smart.
Guest:But it has got, yeah, it's a thing.
Guest:It's a thing, Three Lions.
Guest:Football's coming up, and I am very proud of it.
Marc:You should be.
Marc:It sounds like a big thing.
Guest:Yeah, it is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll send you the links.
Yeah.
Marc:Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:David Baddiel.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:What a pleasure.
Marc:Great audience.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Marc:Thank you, London.
Guest:Thank you very much.
Guest:Cheers.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Thank you, Mark.
Guest:That was fucking great.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:Live from the Bloomsbury Theatre, David Baddiel.
Marc:Again, Jews Don't Count is available wherever you get books.
Marc:Please, folks, hang out for a second, will you?
Marc:So look, we did another Ask Mark Anything episode for full Marin subscribers.
Marc:I answered questions about everything from President Obama to Jethro Tull, including this one.
Marc:I was listening to an older episode recently, and you mentioned a show you were doing for Vice.
Marc:I Googled and saw announcements for it, but nothing else.
Marc:What happened with that?
Marc:I don't know what happened with that.
Marc:The Vice Network was a big idea.
Marc:They brought me in.
Marc:I was very reluctant to
Marc:They made promises.
Marc:We were going to try to do an interview show and have it be somewhat like WTF, but we have found that to be impossible to do.
Marc:And we did one pilot episode with John Cameron Mitchell, and they made all these promises about guests, but they could get none.
Marc:Huge lists of guests kept coming and going.
Marc:No one signed on.
Marc:No one knew what it was.
Marc:No one knew what the network was.
Marc:I don't know what the issue was, but we just kept looking at guest lists and approving them and then nothing happening until it went away.
Marc:You can get that episode plus all our bonus content by subscribing to the full Marin on WTF Plus.
Marc:Sign up by going to the link in the episode description or go to WTFPod.com and click on WTF Plus.
Marc:My tour dates are winding down, thank God.
Marc:I can use a break.
Marc:I'm tired of myself.
Marc:I'm tired of my material.
Marc:But I'm not so tired that I'm not going to do a great show coming up in New York.
Marc:Got to trim that shit down.
Marc:But there's only three more left this year.
Marc:My shows at the Orange Peel in Asheville, North Carolina are sold out.
Marc:Still some tickets for the show in Nashville, Tennessee.
Marc:I'm at the James K. Polk Center on Saturday, December 2nd.
Marc:And my HBO special taping is at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:There are still some tickets.
Marc:For the second show, go to wtfpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:I did a little pensive guitar for you.
Thank you.
.
.
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey in La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.
Marc:Happy Thanksgiving.
Marc:Can you do it?