David Baddiel’s My Family: Not The Sitcom is the funeral speech that Baddiel says he wasn’t able to give. Obviously, he says he would probably omit elements such as his mother’s brash sexual nature, and her affair with her lover David White, which remained a source of pride in her life. Sarah Baddiel was very much a 60s woman, and she was a lot more than a Jewish suburban mother. Baddiel’s hilarious, heart-warming and often shocking recollection of memories provides a fitting eulogy for his late mother.

The evening takes place in the Menier Chocolate Factory, one of the lesser known gems of London theatre space. The stage is lined with pictures of his parents: his mother’s golfing paraphernalia, videos of her appearances on his television shows, anecdotes of her heckling Baddiel on his own television show, and accidentally lighting his birthday cake on fire due to an excess of candles. Baddiel also speaks candidly about his mother’s open sexual nature, her infuriating misuse of hyphenation, and more provocative objects of his mother’s such as her own erotic poetry.

David Baddiel discusses the notions of truth, and how it fails to conform to the notions of respectability and boundaries. He starts the show by using an example of his son Ezra’s joke that “Red Bull gives you diabetes”. Baddiel speaks of the consequent retaliation in which one Twitter user branded him as “#poortastechild”. However, as Baddiel states, these are his stories of his mother and he can speak of her quirks and brash sexual openness in an attempt to illustrate how wonderful she truly was.

In the second section of the show, Baddiel speaks of his father who currently has Pick’s disease, a type of dementia which causes mood swings, swearing and violent outbursts. Baddiel says these elements are just his father – an intelligent man who hailed from Swansea, earned his PhD in Chemistry and apparently created a type of LSD (which perhaps contributed to his later dementia). He talks about his father in a similarly fond fashion as he speaks of a mix of hilarious and touching anecdotes.

My Family: Not The Sitcom allows us to question how we talk about our loved ones who have recently passed. As Baddiel states at the beginning, he isn’t entirely sure if this is what his mother would have wanted, but she loved to be in the spotlight and this show, more than anything, illustrates exactly how she was wonderful. It lies within her suggested naming of Baddiel’s daughter as “Shenandoah”, and her multiple exclamation points within emails. The show sheds light on a very rarely talked upon subject and “brings laughter into a house of death”.

David Baddiel – My Family: Not the Sitcom is playing at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 25 June. For more information and tickets, see the Menier Chocolate Factory website.