David Baddiel: trauma passed on from Holocaust is why I do comedy

David Baddiel: ‘There is definitely trauma in our lives; it’s partly referred trauma from the Nazis and the terrible stuff that happened.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

David Baddiel has said he makes comedy to process the intergenerational trauma passed on through the experiences of his mother and grandparents of fleeing the Holocaust.

Baddiel’s mother was born in Nazi Germany and arrived in the UK as a baby in 1939 after her father was persecuted during the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom against Jews.