Meet Dustin Diamond. You know … the guy who played that annoying, corny character “Screech” on the 90s pre-teen sit-com Saved by the Bell. Forget anything you might have heard about him. For a child-star and a celebrity, his life is so plain and typical that he had to make a cloud of lies and exaggerations in order to write about it. He stands for what millions of Americans and most other celebrities also stand for: whining about nothing, lying about everything, and being completely self-absorbed. In September 2009 his autobiography was published. And it’s a piece of crap.

If you ever wondered what Dustin Diamond’s life is all about, all you’d need to do is read the title of his autobiography: Behind the Bell. It starts with Dustin Diamond’s parents dropping everything for their 11 year-old son and moving to Los Angeles. After working the rounds doing commercials, Diamond got an audition to play the character Screech in the pre-Saved by the Bell-pilot, Good Morning, Miss Bliss. During the audition the young Dustin Diamond suggested some changes to the Screech character in front of a room full of executives. They thought his ideas were great and he auditioned perfectly. Keep in mind that this is Dustin Diamond’s version of what happened. He quickly makes it into the cast as the scrawny geek, Samuel “Screech” Powers. Dustin makes friends with the executives at NBC. Brandon Tartikoff, an NBC producer famous for developing a long train of teen-centered, morally-wholesome sit-coms, was one of the closest to Dustin. According to Behind the Bell, he also happened to be a “huge Screech fan.”

I don’t know if Diamond is aware of it, but in his autobiography he divides everybody into two basic categories: the good-guys (Screech fans) and bad-guys (everyone else). Naturally, the producers of Good Morning, Miss Bliss were huge Screech fans.

After a few pilot episodes were filmed, NBC and Disney called off a merger deal that was in the works. This left Miss Bliss out in the cold and it was dropped. Brandon Tartikoff liked the show so much that he brought most of the Miss Bliss staff over to NBC and re-cast them in a new show that was meant to compete with the morning cartoons and meant to hit the same demographic: little kids. The show was renamed Saved by the Bell and intense filming began. This forced Dustin Diamond to drop out of public school and to start taking classes at the studio. He basically went to homeschool on steroids.

For a few reasons that even Dustin Diamond couldn’t grasp, he became the loser of the Saved by the Bell cast, on and off the set. I’ll explain why. First off, he was a couple years younger than the rest of the cast. This meant that he was 13 while everyone else was 15 or 16. And if you’re Dustin Diamond, that’s a huge maturity gap. (Keep this in mind for when I talk about his stand-up comedy, below.) Second, he’s a super scrawny, weird-looking kid with a white-guy afro. Third, in his book he talks a lot about all the “hilarious” pranks he pulled on the rest of the cast. I can picture an adult Dustin Diamond giggling while writing those passages. Anyway, he got made fun of a lot. Boo hoo. Even though all through the book he portrays himself as the strong, intelligent, lone wolf of the group, it’s easy to see that being younger and plain-old uncool really got to him. How else can you explain his book?

Behind the Bell was printed in 2009 by a Canadian publishing house called Transit Publishing. Displayed proudly on their website, Behind the Bell sits beautifully next to titles like The Murder of Anna Nicole Smith, Looking Good Naked and Brangelina: The Untold Story of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. If Transit’s third-rate quality isn’t clear enough yet, you need to understand that Behind the Bell is completely unedited and obviously not fact-checked. Many professional book-reviewers and major news outlets were calling this book a “shocking tell-all” which makes me wonder if anyone actually bothered to read it. Weighing in at over three-hundred pages of thinly sliced bullshit, the book is full of inconsistencies, typos, grammatical errors and plenty of extremely obvious lies. Like the part where Screech is signing autographs and some guy offers him a kilo of cocaine.

I did another solo show in Miami, where I signed a bunch of promo material for a very excited young girl and was immediately approached by some Tony Montana-looking, scar-faced Cuban dude. He was surrounded by an entourage of grouchy Cubans sporting shoulder holsters filled with an array of large-caliber weaponry. Tony Montana sat down next to me and in a thick Cuban accent said, “You do that show and make my daughter happy. I have a gift for you.” He led me out back to the trunk of his black Mercedes and offered me, from a pile of white bricks, a kilo of cocaine. I gracefully declined … though I can think of some other cast mates who might possibly been tempted.

When I first looked into this book, I checked Amazon. Reviews were hilariously low and prices were way too high. (One Amazon reviewer put it simply: “This is basically a few hundred pages of Screech trying to convince the reader that he is cool.”) So I checked my local library. Surprisingly every branch of the public library system had at least one copy checked-in. At $25 apiece we’re talking about a sick waste of library money.

Behind the Bell reeks of a young Dustin Diamond’s teenage-angst. The entire mid-section of the book is spent half-assed trashing his ex-cast members. In each chapter he exaggerates what he saw, speculates on what he didn’t see, and then lies about things he supposedly did. I’ll sum up a few hundred pages and make things simple. I’ll tell you which cast member he’s talking about, I’ll tell you what Diamond says happened, and then I’ll make a conservative guess as to what realistically happened.

Who: Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Zack Morris
Screech says: He was the “golden child” (the star) of the cast. So unfair! He artificially lightened his hair. He got big and buff once he passed puberty so I think he was on steroids for a while. Everybody copied him.
What actually happened: Dustin Diamond was jealous of the fact that Mark-Paul was bigger, stronger, and got more attention than him.

Who: Mario Lopez as A.C. Slater
Screech says: He was a “man-whore.” He constantly worked out so he’d look good on camera for the ladies. He acted tough hung out with Mexican gangster friends. Once he hit puberty he had “man-boobs” for a while.
What actually happened: Dustin Diamond was jealous that Lopez was bigger, stronger and got more attentions from girls than him.

Who: Tiffani-Amber Thiessen as Kelly Kapowski
Screech says: She had a “fat ass.” Once the executives saw how fat she was, we all had to start eating healthy food. She had sex with Mario Lopez, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and everyone else except for me.
What actually happened: Dustin Diamond was jealous of the cute girl who paid attention to the boys her age instead of his prepubescent self.

Who: Elizabeth Berkley as Jessie Spano
Screech says: She was a shitty actor and she was a follower. She has zero-class because after Saved by the Bell she starred in Showgirls and showed her tits. After that she was typecasted as “the skank.” She was Gosselaar and Lopez’s “sloppy seconds” after Thiessen.
What actually happened: Dustin Diamond was jealous of the cute girl who paid attention to the boys her age instead of his prepubescent self.

Who: Lark Voorhies as Lisa Marie Turtle
Screech says: She was a good girl who was corrupted by both the cast and L.A. in general. I think she was abused, because she was weird.
What actually happened: She started out being nice by talking to him but then found out that he was really immature and dumb.

After getting all of that out of his system he goes back to his favorite subject: Screech and himself. The book’s saggy mid-section is little more than Dustin Diamond speaking out against how immoral and scandalous he thought everybody was. He calls his under-age cast mates sluts, skanks and man-whores over and over. Following all of that we hit a new chapter titled “Making Chicks ‘Screech!’” It starts with:

Is it bragging to say I’ve banged over two thousand chicks in my life? Maybe it is, but it’s a fact. There were days when I had sex three times with three different, lucky ladies. In the SBTB studio alone I would bang girls in my dressing room or in the prop warehouse and spend the night in my dressing room at NBC.

What do stupid people do when they have to recount an embarrassing past? They lie, lie, lie. The lies don’t stop with Dustin Diamond’s Saved by the Bell days, either.

After the original Saved by the Bell series ended there was a short-lived spin-off called Saved by the Bell: The College Years. Some of the original actors were in it. NBC found racially-appropriate replacements for those who left. This spin-off was canceled after one season and everyone except Dustin Diamond left the show. He stuck around for another short-lived spin-off series called Saved by the Bell: The New Class, where he plays Screech turned teacher. The show was eventually canceled and Dustin Diamond found himself more than ten years deep into the Screech character. He decided that it was time to try and break out of his typecast.

By the end of The New Class in the late 90s, Diamond heard that there was going to be a live-action Scooby-Doo movie. He saw this as his opportunity to break out of the Screech character and onto the real Hollywood scene. So he did what every typical dork does when they hear that a live-action movie of an old cartoon is going to be made: claim to be an old-school fan and start imagining what the movie should be like.

Without auditioning or talking to anyone actually involved in making the movie, he decided that he was going to play Shaggy. He started dressing like Shaggy, taking photos of himself as Shaggy, and practicing the voice of Shaggy. He even came up with a half-baked screenplay idea involving rotoscoping (a technique where animators trace over real footage, creating more realistic looking animations) and preserving the old school look of the cartoon, ignoring the fact that it would no longer be a live-action movie if it were to be rotoscoped. While he was doing all of this Mike Myers and others were actually working on an early version of the screenplay. As producers gathered and different screenplays were written, the years rolled by. In the end it was the extremely tall, skinny, and goofy-looking Matthew Lillard who was cast as Shaggy. But in Dustin Diamond’s head that’s not how it happened at all:

In the end, of course, the script wasn’t green-lighted until 2001 with a cast of douchey teen heartthrobs led by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr. Their first order of business was to make sure their best pal, Matthew Lillard, was given the role of Shaggy. I got the freeze-out on my dream project. And it was cold.

No matter how you put it, it’s clear this Scooby-Doo nonsense ended his big-screen acting career before it could even start. When asked in an interview if he regretted anything about his days with Saved by the Bell, he said:

It got me to where I am now. I live a really good life. I enjoy myself, ya know? [stutters] I mean, stand up is great. You know the audiences are fans of mine now and not just the screech thing.

Have you ever heard of a Screech fan? Or how about a Dustin Diamond fan? I’ve known one Screech fan in my life: my next-door neighbor from when I was a kid. This is the guy who came over to my house with his rollerblades on and got into an argument with my brother. As he was skating away and promising to kill us all, he slipped on a rock and fell on his ass. We all laughed at him while he struggled to get back up.

After everyone beat that Saved by the Bell dead horse until there was nothing left, Dustin Diamond realized his acting career was over. So he started doing stand-up comedy. I guess he figured that since he played a “funny” character on TV that he would be funny on-stage. Or more likely, his manager suggested it to him. Either way he’s not very good at it. He’s not very funny and not very original. In fact, in his book he basically tells us who’s stand-up he is trying to rip-off: Bob Saget. Dustin Diamond gives away the formula for his own stand-up while trying to describe Saget’s comedy to the reader:

Bob Saget is such a down-and-dirty sunuvabitch. He doesn’t just work blue, he practically works brown. I think Saget’s return to his first love — being an insanely dirty and wickedly absurd comic — was a big mental implosion for millions of people who believe everything they watch on television, who believe actors actually are the characters they portray.

Diamond probably saw himself in the same boat as Bob Saget because they both starred in family-centric sit-coms. Now they both do some form of blue humor. The similarities stop at the fact that they both swear on stage. Bob Saget has done a lot more than play on some stupid shit like Full House. He directed Dirty Work and played in movies like Half Baked and Dumb and Dumber. His stand-up, where he got his start, is known for being vulgar but it’s not immature or stupid. He tells jokes that you’d never see coming and he can handle the crowd like a pro. On the other hand, Dustin Diamond’s act centers on shocking the crowd with material that isn’t very shocking. He swears, references sex acts and mentions Saved by the Bell. He tries desperately to do what Bob Saget does, but he’s so bad that the only way he can handle a heckler is by calling him or her a fag. See for yourself.

Dustin Diamond doing Stand-Up

Bob Saget – That Aint Right

I don’t know where Dustin Diamond got the idea that he is funny. Or the idea that he is creative. Just because he played a goofy character? He said it himself. He was just an actor, someone who regurgitated lines written by someone else. And for what it’s worth, the character he played was about as corny, cheesy and generally not funny as it gets. But that didn’t stop him from claiming: “Screech — the character I created to entertain children and drunken college students.” Not only is that ridiculous, but it’s really not something to brag about if it were true.

These days, when people talk about Dustin Diamond they always talk about how huge of an asshole he is. This is mostly based off his appearance on the reality TV show Celebrity Fit Club where he challenged former U.S. Marine Corps First Sergeant Harvey Walden to a “UFC match.” Harvey, the former Sergeant of the 4th Tank Battalion and Marine drill instructor, was stopped by other cast members from acting on his military-bred first instinct: KILL.

Dustin Diamond Wimping Out on Celebrity Fit Club

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After provoking the fight Diamond pulls out the ultimate Hollywood bitch line: “Richard, it’s going to become a hostile work environment. My lawyer is going to be on the phone immediately.” But he doesn’t talk about any of this directly in his biography. In Behind the Bell, things always happen opposite of reality:

In my career now, doing stand-up comedy and making notorious appearances on reality TV shows, I feel like people have begun to embrace me as a completely separate entity from the character Screech. In my comedy, people judge me on my material and whether or not I can make them laugh. In my role as a reality-TV villain, people appropriately hate me as the whiny, spiteful scumbag I portray.

Reality TV isn’t acting. For most celebrities, it’s public humiliation. It’s “take someone who used to be famous, but can’t work a normal job these-days, and make them look stupid on national television.”

Dustin Diamond thinks he’s notorious for being an asshole. He’s giving himself too much credit. He’s a dumbass. He’s a liar. And he’s still a total loser. Think back to school. Think of the type of kid who was always talking about how many “chicks” he’s scored with. That guy is Dustin Diamond. Even he agrees:

I think your adult life is just an extension of high school. High school is that period when you’re forming your personality, discovering what sort of person you really are, or want to work to be … We were all there at one point, and many still are. There were times when I was bullied for being Screech on SBTB. I turned to martial arts for the emotional balance and …

Enough of that garbage. If you read between the lines you can see a kid who is still trying desperately to grow up and become what he wants to become. The sad part is that besides “something different,” I don’t think he knows who he wants to be or how he’s going to get there. There’s a lot more to this story. Like when he ripped off fans by claiming to be on the brink of losing his house and selling t-shirts on Howard Stern. Or when he sued the owner of the site dustindiamond.com for making fun of him and lost on the grounds that nobody could possibly take it seriously. Or when he “leaked” a sex-tape hoping to launch his career Paris Hilton-style. But there’s no point in going into this much further, because it all follows one sad formula: a pathetic cry for attention.

Behind the Bell is an embarrassing document (in the words of the back cover) of “what happens when kids grow up too fast, too rich, and too famous.” These kinds of people don’t grow up and they never change. The book, like his life, needs a huge disclaimer stamped at the beginning: “I’M NOT GAY. I’M NOT A VIRGIN. I’M NOT FINISHED. I AM COOL. HERE IS PROOF.” In his attempt to smear the reputations of his former cast-mates he ends up reaching a new level of delusion and shame. He ends up giving us examples of what not to do and why. Ultimately, Behind the Bell is an explanation of why washed-up celebrities never deserved to be idolized and should never be emulated: they’re just as shitty as anyone else.

(Note: Check your local public library for a copy of Behind the Bell.)