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It 's sold 1-liners for the novels and scripts, but until he can' t stop the jokes - that a Jew or a guy - record helped him find peace

Say what you like about David Baddiel but you can't say he's lacking in ambition. Take the novel to which he's currently putting the finishing touches. "It was sort of inspired, a bit, by the death of Saul Bellow. And the character is a kind of slightly deliberately absurd, um …" â€" a pause, a testing of the water to see if he can get away with such a long word and not sound too pretentious â€" "concatenation of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Arthur Koestler."

The Death of Eli Gold is "about the idea of the Great Man, and how I think that is dying. That notion of men who could live their lives in the most brutal way possible, especially towards women â€" also children, to some extent â€" because their greatness excused everything. A way of living life, in which, essentially, greatness allows your dick to do what it likes"; a way of living in which being able to have sex with whoever you want becomes, he says, paraphrasing a line from a review of Updike by David Foster Wallace, the cure for existential despair. "Men now can't live like that, which I think is a good thing, but the cost of it is that I think unalloyed greatness is gone in our culture. So the book is about those blokes, and that type of masculinity."

But Baddiel grew up lower-middle-class in Dollis Hill, north London, the second of three sons of a father who was a chemist for Unilever and became a dealer in Dinky toys when he was made redundant, and a mother who dealt in golf memorabilia. Before Cambridge, and most of a PhD (hence the idea of him as an intellectual) he went to an Orthodox Jewish school, learnt Hebrew, went to a Jewish youth group â€" "this is making me sound like more of an über-Jew than I feel. But when I was young I probably didn't realise it was, for want of a better word, abnormal, or â€" certainly I didn't realise I was in a minority."

my life, in my 1970s north London life â€""

Do you think he shouldn't have said that? "I don't know â€" I now can't remember whether or not it was more upsetting to hear that from Mr Cohen, or to then discover it at the school, that there was racism and antisemitism" â€" for example, when someone daubed "Baddiel is a Paki" on the wall. "I didn't quite know how to take that â€" obviously it's not nice â€" but it's also kind of wrong, you know?" As for Mr Cohen, "he probably shouldn't have said it, because every time I think about that thing, I think well, the trouble with it is that right though it might be, it perpetuates an idea of the Jewish community as quite defensive and telling their children from a very early age you've got watch out for it."

Thirty-odd years later the dilemma was just one of the many aspects of his background he used as grist to the comic mill of The Infidel, which stars Omid Djalili as a hapless, lovable, football-mad Muslim minicab driver who discovers, when his mum dies, that he was born a Jew. There are some good jokes, mostly based on the shock of taking stereotypes head-on, thus neutralising, complicating, and mocking them, but the film is in the end unconvincingly cuddly and quite sentimental, dodging the aspects of both religions that aren't easily subsumed into a liberal upper-middle-class, can't-everyone-just-get-along view of the world. But Baddiel, a tad defensive that it didn't live up to its billing as potentially fatwa-inducing, insists that that's how he meant it to come across all along. "I actually thought it was more radical and more subversive to take this subject and notdifficult to make a dark satire, but also to try to do something, inclusive, and good. "

not making jokes about something is a type â€" and this sounds very pretentious â€" of apartheid. It's saying, 'You're not allowed into the comedy community,' and actually, most people want to have jokes made about them, and want to make jokes about themselves, and want to be involved in the process of comedy â€" and so it's a very alienation thing, I think, to say, 'Oh, we can't make jokes about them.'"

That seems to have been the reaction in most of the Middle East, although the Dubai censorship board is having second thoughts. Israeli distributors, on the other hand, have shown no interest whatsoever. Perhaps it has something to do with its joke about Israeli Jews â€" "you know, Jews without angst, without guilt. They're really not Jews at all"; perhaps not.

At one point in the run-up to the film's release Baddiel noted that he had written it the way he did â€" Muslim finds out he's a Jew, rather than Jew finds out he's a Muslim â€" because he felt more comfortable making jokes about his own background than about Muslims; he has also said, interestingly, that his generation have access to a particular kind of irony about their Jewishness that his children's generation will not.

Baddiel's maternal grandparents fled Germany just before the war, during which his grandfather was interned on the Isle of Man (a box of letters he sent home provided a basis for Baddiel's third novel, The Secret Purposes), and so that great seriousness, of possible annihilation, was always present. Such seriousness, thinks Baddiel, coming from first-hand knowledge of persecution, and in his grandparents' case, from immersion in religion (both Baddiel and his father are atheists) â€" allows a certain kind of undercutting, a necessary subversiveness, which his privileged, protected, non-Jewish children (because their mother, Morwenna Banks, isn't) cannot have.

But there are all sorts of other spurs to being funny, or at least finding funny to be necessary, and although Baddiel is uncomfortable about looking at it too closely, he gives it a go. "We had a strange upbringing. My parents are very unusual characters, both of them â€" they're both only children, and they're great, but neither of them are the sort of standard idea of a parent, and not of Jewish parents. They've both got a lot of their own stuff. And actually I've always felt parented, to a certain extent â€" which is no disrespect to my parents who I love very dearly â€" by my older brother". His brother, also a comedy writer, played him Derek and Clive at a tender age ("It was an absolute epiphany for me, that something could be that funny, and that unrestrained"). But his father was funny, too, if also "very swear-y. He was very unlike most dads I knew â€" he was always swearing and always angry. He was kind of frightening, but at the same time it was funny."

Although he will be doing some gigs in the autumn (headlining an event called Laughter Lounge, part of O2, for example), Baddiel doesn't perform much any more. Partly it's because he got less interested in writing stand-up â€" "it's quite a staccato experience â€" you write one gag, and then another gag â€" and I wanted to write something more narrative and organic, for want of a better word. When I do stand-up in the autumn there will be gags, but it'll mainly be mainly be true stories from my life, which I quite like telling."

But also it was because it wasn't making him happy. Baddiel has suffered from periods of severe depression for which he was prescribed drugs. "And then I discovered that they were horrible, and they were destroying me both physically and mentally", so he gave them up, in favour of several years of therapy. These days, although he knows the illness could recur, he feels on a more even keel â€" which "does seem to have coincided with giving up performing, which I just think is psychologically very stressful. I don't think performing was making me depressed, I think that other things were making me depressed â€" and then I'd have to go on stage and be funny each night, and I think that those two things don't work together very well. And it is true that at 46 I'm more interested in being happy â€" actually, it's more like being at peace."

Unfaithful DVD released on August 9. Death of Eli Gold (4 Estate) published in the next year

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