Our Grade:
Title: Don’t Hassel the Hoff
Author: David the
Hasselhoff
Publication Info: St. Martin’s Press May 2007, ISBN: 0312371292
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy
If I were asked to sum up my impressions of this book in eight words, it would go like this: “This book was terrible. I enjoyed it immensely.”
Aside: This is something you bitches (who have, by the way, gone too far) should know about me. For me, the answers to the questions, “Was the [movie][show][book] any good?” and “Did you enjoy the [movie][show][book]?” are quite often different. I lurrrrrve bad entertainment. Now, there are differences between bad/enjoyable entertainment and bad/unenjoyable entertainment. For example, one night, before we were married, Sarah and I rented two movies: City of Angels
and BASEketball
. Both were bad movies, but one of them was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t Baseketball. City of Angels was bad and unwatchable. Baseketball was bad and enjoyable. If you’ve ever read New York magazine, you’ve seen the little “Approval Matrix” grid they have, with one axis running from “highbrow” to “lowbrow” and the other running from “brilliant” to “despicable”; my tastes would be found in the lowbrow/brilliant quadrant. Anyway, I digress. The point is, I love me some bad entertainment, and Don’t Hassel the Hoff fits the bill perfectly. The “C” grade is actually a hybrid between an “F” for quality and an “A” for enjoyability.
In case you don’t know, this book tells the story of one David Hasselhoff, from the (not really) mean streets of Baltimore to Knight Rider to Baywatch to the Berlin wall to Broadway. The story itself is not very interesting. What is interesting, and what makes this book so horrendously fun, is that The Hoff™ fancies himself to be some kind of godlike figure. He would like to have you believe that his life has been devoted, not to making scads of money producing popular but insipid entertainment, but to healing the children of the world. In the prologue, he tells us:
“In my travels I visited the children’s wards of hospitals in forty countries: I rarely left a country without visiting sick children. It became a mission. The children had absolute faith in the Knight Rider.”
He then tells the following story: “The child was in a coma, oblivious to his surroundings….[The parents] said: ‘Maybe you could hold his hand and the darkness won’t seem so dark.’ After being with the boy for a half hour, I turned to the parents and said: ‘Can I ask you a question? How do you retain your faith in God when something like this happens to your son?” They said: “David, we know there is no hope for our child but we prayed that his hero would come and, David, you came.’”
No, wait, it gets better. Later on in the book, his Hoffiness tells us the following:
“In the hotel elevator, I spoke to a mother and her teenaged daughter. ‘Nice to see you guys.’ The daughter started freaking out. ‘You’re her favorite star,’ the mother said. ‘Why thank you. I’ve got to go to work right now, but if you write down your name and address I’ll leave you an autographed picture.’ When I got back to Los Angeles, there was a letter from the mother saying:
‘Thank you very much for the photographs. My daughter had attempted suicide that morning. She said she had nothing to live for. The only person in the world she believed in was you, David, and because you happened to be in that elevator and because you took a moment to say hello, you restored her self-esteem. She said, ‘I will never kill myself again because I believe that he was sent for a reason.’’
God does send angels and sometimes we are his angels.”
Sorry, excuse my earlier statement that El Hoff believes himself to be a God. He merely believes himself to be an angel. I stand corrected.
In addition to healing the children of the world, Sir Hoffsalot also describes to us how he was responsible for tearing down the Berlin Wall. There’s not really any interesting writing here, so I won’t quote it, but suffice it to say that one reason you may want to avoid hasseling the Hoff is that he might single-handedly destroy your entire political system with his singing.
The Hoffmeister spends the rest of the book taking us through the various trials and tribulations of his life. Highlights include his early years in Hollywood, where he lived in some kind of hippie communal house (actually several), but of course didn’t approve of all the drugs; his days a soap star; the creative struggles he had with others on the Knight Rider set (really, I’m not kidding); the rise, fall, and ridiculous resurrection in syndication of Baywatch; and his failed marriages, one of which is the subject of my favorite passage in the book:
“All through the New Year of 1986 I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself and looking out of my window at my avocado tree. Suddenly, I decided to go to a pet store and buy a wiener dog – I’d always wanted a wiener and I bought one. I brought him home and said, ‘Well, Wiener, it’s you and me against the world.’” (Note that it is not clear whether he actually named the dog Wiener, or he just hadn’t named it yet at that point, but I hope it’s the former.)
Yup, I think that sums up this book pretty well. “Well, Wiener, it’s you and me against the world.”
The last thing I want to add, which Sarah may or may not edit out, is that I found it highly interesting that one of the main investors in the syndication of Baywatch was Chris Craft, the boat company. This is only interesting because the summer camp at which Sarah and I used to work had a Chris Craft boat for many years, and, um, one summer, Sarah and I engaged in (ahem) certain romantic activities thereon. So, you know, one thing the Hoff and I have in common is that Chris Craft was a big part of our lives.
So yeah, that’s the Hoff. Highly terrible, but also highly amusing. With Wiener.
