Dear Kim Basinger,

Please stop driving Alec Baldwin batshit crazy. Pretty please? We’re sure you have your reasons, but despite all that, and perhaps because of it, he is a deeply funny man. He makes lot of people laugh, hard to be exact. The world needs men like him. Most of us don’t have much these days, and when you get right down to it, for a lot of us laughter is all we got. We don’t ask for much, just this: please don’t kill the funny.

Sincerely,

The Phawker

PREVIOUSLY: Baldwin’s bizarre outburst capped a day that began at 12:55 a.m., when he was rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital after his 14-year-old daughter, Ireland, dialed 911, sources said. “I’m tired of this,” Baldwin said, his daughter told the dispatcher. “I’m going to take some pills. I’m going to end this.” When cops arrived at Baldwin’s pad on Central Park West, the actor told them he took an Ambien sleeping pill and had “no intention” of committing suicide, sources said. Baldwin, who is due to emcee the Oscars on March 7, told cops he and Ireland had been arguing over the phone and that his daughter was “put up” to dial 911 by her mom, actress Kim Basinger, sources said. Still, cops had Baldwin checked out and doctors released him after deciding he was no threat to himself, sources said. When the “30 Rock” star returned home, he found reporters on his doorstep. “This is another example of Kim’s sickness,” a buddy of Baldwin’s told the Daily News. “Alec came back from the hospital and there were cameras outside his house at 2 a.m. Gee, I wonder how they found out?” MORE

RELATED: Then, in April of last year—not long after he finished shooting the first season of “30 Rock”—Baldwin left a voice mail on his daughter’s cell phone. “I am tired of playing this game with you,” he said, and his voice rose to a shout. “I’m leaving this message with you to tell you that you have insulted me for the last time.” She had made him “feel like shit,” he said, adding, “You’ve made me feel like a fool over and over and over again.” He referred to Basinger as a “thoughtless pain in the ass” and to Ireland as a “rude, thoughtless little pig.”

Baldwin had spent a week with Ireland in February, and another week in March. But, in the days leading up to the voice mail, he had not been able to reach her on the phone, despite an arrangement decided in court: four scheduled calls a week. He told me, “One thing people don’t understand: I had lived my life for years a certain way. That is, always having a seat on the aisle when I go to the theatre, because I had to make my court-appointed phone call at a certain time. I mean, the hoops that I jumped through. So, once again: I was in a restaurant having dinner with my friends”—at Shun Lee, near Lincoln Center—“and I’m watching the clock and I get up and I can’t get a signal, and I walk out into the street and, once again, for the tenth day, there’s not even a ring—it goes right to voice mail. It’s not even turned on, and I freak out—it was wrong, I’m sorry I did that—I freak out.”

One evening a week later, the message was posted at TMZ.com, an online celebrity-gossip site. (Baldwin is sure that Basinger was responsible for the leak; she has denied it.) The next morning, it was a news story. Not long after that, near the subway station at Seventy-second Street and Broadway, a woman shouted at Baldwin, “Why don’t you call your fucking daughter, you fucking asshole?”

“When the tape came out, I wanted to die,” Baldwin said. “I wanted to die, literally. I didn’t want to live anymore. Every night, I’d say my prayers”—Baldwin is still a churchgoer—“and I’d say, ‘Please don’t let me wake up in the morning. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ” MORE