In the autumn of 2017, two British comedians arrived in bookshops with memoirs from the same publisher, highlighting the growing success of British comedians as authors. Robert Webb’s How Not to Be a Boy entered the Sunday Times bestseller list at number one on 10 September. A few weeks later Canongate published Matt Lucas’s Little Me.
It was a tidy illustration of something British comedy has long produced. If you ask which British comedians have had interesting careers outside stand-up, publishing supplies some of the best answers. Dawn French, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Matt Lucas, David Baddiel and Ricky Gervais have between them written memoirs, novels, a bestselling polemic and some of the stranger children’s books in print, and each has a body of work that stands apart from anything they did on stage.
The memoir wave
Webb, half of Mitchell and Webb and the Jeremy of Peep Show, found the seed of his book in a 2014 New Statesman article about his mother’s death and his father’s ideas about masculinity. The memoir stayed on the Sunday Times list for eight weeks and won a Chortle Award, according to Wikipedia.
Lucas’s Little Me: My Life from A to Z is organised alphabetically, so B is for “Baldy” and T is for the TARDIS. A Chortle review noted that he kept some things private, including the death of his former husband.
Webb’s comedy partner David Mitchell had got there first. His Back Story (HarperCollins, October 2012) is built around a walk through Kilburn on which he reflects on his childhood and career, and the Guardian judged it an honest memoir unlike most celebrity ones. Dawn French’s Dear Fatty, which came out in 2008, is described by its publisher as a Sunday Times number one bestseller.
From sketch shows to novels
Baddiel read English at King’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a double first, then became famous on The Mary Whitehouse Experience. His four adult novels are Time for Bed (1996), Whatever Love Means, The Secret Purposes and The Death of Eli Gold (2011), as listed by the Booker Prizes, which also counts him among its judges. Chortle called The Secret Purposes his most acclaimed adult book. It is about the internment of German Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man.
Webb followed his memoir with a novel, Come Again (2020), about a widow who wakes on the day she first met her husband. French’s first three novels, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, Oh Dear Silvia and According to YES, were all Sunday Times bestsellers, and her publisher calls her a Women’s Prize longlisted author.
Children’s books and the wish that goes wrong
Perhaps the most striking pattern is how many comedians turned to children’s writing, and how often the idea behind the book is a single wish or invention.
Baddiel’s The Parent Agency, announced by HarperCollins in 2014, grew from a chat with his nine-year-old son and imagines a world where children choose their parents. A retailer listing calls it the bestselling hardback children’s debut of 2014, and it won a Laugh Out Loud Award for 9 to 13-year-olds. His agency lists ten children’s titles in all.
Lucas’s Thank You, Baked Potato began as a 2020 charity song for Feed NHS and became a picture book, followed by three “Very Silly” joke and game books. His debut novel, The Boy Who Slept Through Christmas (2023), is another wish story, with more than twenty original songs, and was nominated for a 2024 British Book Award. Bobland followed in 2025.
Ricky Gervais took the idea furthest from reality. Flanimals (2004), illustrated by Rob Steen, is a field guide to invented creatures. When More Flanimals reached the US, CBS News reported that the first two books had sold almost 750,000 copies in Britain.
When the jokes give way to argument
One comedian’s book stands apart from the rest. Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count (TLS Books, 2021) argues that antisemitism is overlooked in progressive politics, and a 2022 Channel 4 documentary followed. His agency says it was the Sunday Times Politics and Current Affairs Book of the Year for 2021.
British comedians as authors: Why the page suits them
This is interpretation, not established fact, but the pattern is hard to miss. Sketch and stand-up writers learn to build a premise and pay it off, which is also what a good children’s book needs. A memoir can borrow the rhythm of a routine, and a novel can use comic observation to carry grief or history.
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The common thread
The six comedians here took different routes: memoir for Webb, Mitchell, French and Lucas, fiction for Baddiel and French, children’s books for Baddiel, Lucas and Gervais, and public argument for Baddiel. What they share is a body of published work with an audience of its own, and in several cases bestseller lists and prizes. The success of British comedians as authors shows that, for British comedians, a second career in publishing is well established.