Post-modern zeitgeist

David Hasselhoff is whatever you want him to be:

You see, at some point, right around the midpoint of "Baywatch," long after his stint on "Knight Rider," Hasselhoff became the Hasselhoff, and including him puts [America's Got Talent] right where it wants to be, in terms of the balance between camp and … even more camp. If you're going to make a show where someone is going to sit on a judging panel and admit that he's deathly afraid of jugglers, you want it to be David Hasselhoff. Hasselhoff lends everything he touches an air of the surreal, like his very existence has become so ironic that it's no longer clear whether he's just uncool, so uncool that he's cool, or too much of a symbol of "so uncool he's cool" to actually be cool. The Hasselhoff works on a number of levels both hip and square...