Up close and personal with 'The Hoff'

Five years ago, this column would have been packed with David Hasselhoff jokes. But I got to know the man, and watching a nice guy fall apart isn't as funny to me as it is to the rest of you. So this column will only have an average amount of David Hasselhoff jokes.

Hasselhoff emerged this summer as our culture's new self-appointed pi?ta, doing self-parodying commercials, calling himself "The Hoff" on "America's Got Talent," working on a musical about his life and generally stealing the crown of camp from William Shatner, Regis Philbin and Joe Lieberman. All while going through an ugly divorce and being involved in an unusual number of public disturbances, especially for a recovering alcoholic. Disturbances that would have gotten a lot more attention if he didn't like us Jews so much.

I met Hasselhoff two years ago, when the producers of a sitcom I was writing about Time magazine cast the former "Baywatch" star to play the womanizing war correspondent. I was sitting in my office at the magazine when the phone rang. I picked it up with my usual corporate greeting, which may or may not have mentioned a free football phone, and the voice on the other end said, "Hasselhoff." This was why I wanted to get into Hollywood.

Hasselhoff told me how much he liked my script. "I read the whole thing," he said. Because it was 44 pages of giant-margined, double-space type, much of which was lines he had to memorize, I failed to express as much appreciation as he was looking for. "You know how many 'Baywatch' scripts I read all the way through?" he asked. "Zero."

Once we started shooting the pilot, everyone loved the guy. The only strange thing about him was that he didn't act so much like David Hasselhoff as like a David Hasselhoff impersonator who, while a huge fan of David Hasselhoff, was in on the joke. When he was introduced at the table reading, he responded not by smiling or waving but by miming swimming like a lifeguard.

A few days later, he stopped me in the hall and asked, "Are you big in Germany?" Confused, I told him that neither I, nor my people, were. "Well, I am," he said, and walked away. When our lead actor, Colin Hanks, said he had heard Hasselhoff's song, "Looking For Freedom," played over a news segment about the Berlin Wall that morning, Hasselhoff responded, excitedly, "I was just listening to that song in my car!" Then he started singing it. He signed a script for our writers' assistant with: "Where's the car? Where's the girls? Where's the money?" It was like he was racing to make the Hasselhoff joke before everyone else. Which isn't easy.

A few weeks after our pilot was rejected, Hasselhoff, who had been in rehab two years before, was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving and checked himself back in. Months later, I talked to him on the phone while a friend at Time was interviewing him about his cameo in "The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie." He said he had recovered, and he sent both of us a cake. Colin Hanks never sent me so much as a muffin.

Knowing his history, I didn't think it was so funny when he appeared bloated and crying in the audience at "American Idol." And when his wife divorced him and accused him of beating her, and he showed up in a cast from slicing four tendons and an artery by putting his arm through a chandelier in a "shaving accident," and the Sun reported that he was thrown out of Wimbledon, I didn't think it was as funny as everyone else.

This has happened to me before. I spent two days with Anna Nicole Smith, and after seeing how nice she was and how much trouble she had completing basic tasks, such as speaking, I didn't find her as amusing anymore. Like Smith, Hasselhoff, who owned part of "Baywatch," has tons of money and fans and is really good-looking, so I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for them.

It's me I'm worried about. Humor comes from ignorance, naivete and emotional distance; every real experience cuts down on those skills. That's one reason that comedians get less funny as they grow older and that the smart ones - like Bill Murray and Steve Martin - choose more serious work.

So either I'm going to have to transition into a more serious kind of columnist or studiously avoid any emotional growth. And serious columns sound like they require a lot of research. Godspeed, Hoff.