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Okay, we're jumping the gun here. Is Joey Slotnick really a Hey! It's That Guy! No, not really. So why are we writing about him? One simple reason:

We loves us some Slotnick.

Technically, Slotnick falls into that tricky niche wherein people either (a) have never heard of him and don't recognize him, or (b) know his face, know his name, and feel moved by the enticing tremolo beneath his sweet and tender promises.

Slotnick first came to our attentions -- the attentions of those of us who pay attention to Slotnick, and we are legion -- when he played the irritating best friend to the even more irritating Jonathan Silverman on The Single Guy, an exceptionally irritating example of the uniformly hackneyed and irritating sitcoms that NBC trotted out on Thursday nights in the increasingly irritating late nineties. (See also: Suddenly Susan, Caroline in the City, Jesse and that other stupid one about people working in a cafe. ["That would be the late and unlamented Union Square." -- Wing Chun]) Slotnick was, it should be said, the least irritating of all the supremely irritating cast members, an appraisal somewhat akin to being handed a shoe box full of stool samples from various members of the animal kingdom and being asked to point out the one you'd most like to eat.

Does that make him a HITG!? No.

But then the lovely Ms. F.U.N.K.L.E. and I were strolling through beautiful Montreal during the Just For Laughs comedy festival a few summers ago, and I saw a chap jauntily bopping along, and I thought, "Do I know that fellow? He looks familiar. I think we went to school together." A few paces later, I realized that it was, in fact, Slotnick. I later conferred this experience to the lovely Ms. F, and she relayed that, as though we were living in a Time-Life book, she'd had the exact same experience, i.e. spotting Slotnick, registering familiarity of Slotnick, then assuming Slotnick was someone she might have "gone to school with."

To put the story in some context, once I saw a guy walking out of a hotel in Toronto and thought, I don't know who that is but he must be a star of some sort. He just looks like a star. He carries himself like a star. He shines like a star. And then I realized: that man is Joey Lawrence.

Slotnick, for his part, looked like someone I'd "gone to school with."

Does that make him a HITG!? Of course not.

Fast-forward a few years to the release of Hollow Man. Slotnick. Big time. Did you recognize him there? He'd upped the nebbish ante, going beyond his affable best friend schtick from The Single Guy to portray a nerdy computer techie, playing solidly off his Muppet-esque good looks, like Jeremy Piven reimagined by Brian Henson, with his ovoid head and fringe of corona-like curls that teeters on the top of his dome like a gingerly-placed laurel wreath.

Slotnick.

Does that make him a HITG!? Maybe. Maybe.

Fast forward to this past Monday night. David E. Kelley's latest. Boston Public. The man knows talent. The man's cast Slotnick. Slotnick, even more nebbishy here, the Poindexter, a kind of nerdlinger comic foil, the twitchy teacher in sweater vests and mismatched plaids. But underneath it burns. It smolders. It whispers your name.

Slotnick.

When you saw him on Boston Public did you say, as my sister did to me, "Where do I know that guy from?" Did you, by uttering that simple inquiry, repeated thousands of time that night across the continent, participate in the coronation of a new Hey! It's That Guy!, a man known to his acolytes by a simple, single name? Slotnick. What is Slotnick? We know not, but we know this:

We loves us some.