Dilbert - C or D?

*I may be being a little melodramatic.

D: Elbonia. "It's a meeting - ABOUT MEETINGS!!!!!!! Do you see?"

I read someone (Bill Watterson?) arguing that the rise of non-artist Adams types was down to the space available for a strip shrinking and a (linked) lack of editorial concern/respect for drawing and storytelling in cartoons.

Obviously I agree with the pop stuff - outsource stuff you can't do well!

I just with that there wasn't so much shame in hiring someone to write songs for you if you're a good singer but a bad songwriter

It's true, you have to form a band with a good songwriter to make it socially acceptable. It would be kind of cool to be the Frank Sinatra of rock bands, though, like a cover band except you'd be playing songs no one has heard yet.

"SIR, TURN OFF YOUR LAPTOP!!!"
"No way, I've gotta bring this sucker in for a landing! (Can I do that in Excel?)"

The boss's laptop needs to be shaken to reboot it, because it is in fact an etch-a-sketch.

(I think it captured in detail that weird period when you had to have non-high-tech managers in high-tech companies, because that's all there was.)

"I was just wondering, if you died, would the coffee cup walk around by itself?"

(this is more universal, I suspect)

"40% of sick days are taken on Friday and Monday; this is unacceptable."

As for the comedy - sometimes stomach creasingly funny, innevitably suffers from massive production targets, of course. And the material, as pointed out above, IS dating, alas.

The books are plenty of the notions formalised and expanded to complete theories, and I'd hazard form a decent insight into employee motivations.

but there is nothing weird about that... bosses have boss skills, which are entirely different to doing things skills, so small wonder that bosses become head of the World Wide Wicket Corporation when they don't really know what a wicket is and whether you can eat it.

anyway, this is what you should be looking at: http://pied.nu/banned/the_Dilbert_Hole/tn/14.gif.html

(the best part is how Wally is virtually unchanged from the real comic strip)

this guy is a right wing creationist douche

Isn't he a Satanist?

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/09/a-feeling-im-be.html

^^^this is some high-end useful idiocy

If you let a guy like that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.

Um, is this sentence a joke?

OK, the whole thing's a joke.

I was gonna say!

Doesn't sound like a right wing creatonist here:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/05/the-economics-p.html

Actuallt, if you read his blog, he sounds more like a science geek with some libertarian leanings rather than a right wing creationist. Where'd you get that idea?

A cartoon engineer, that's what he is.

Scott Adams, feminist

Ah, Dilbert. For so long, you have lingered there on the comics page, always ready to barrel-shoot the inanity of office culture with your humorously-coiffed characters and beleaguered engineers, locked forever in a corporate development hell that your humor at first mocked, and then later resembled.

Mostly, though, I haven't really paid attention to you at all, at least until today, when the internet discovered a post where Dilbert creator Scott Adams gave us all a piece of his mind in a post (since deleted) about men's rights, and the fact that he thinks men suffer a level of social injustice equal to women.

After all, women might get paid less than men in our society, but men die earlier, teen boys have to pay higher car insurance, and sometimes women want men to open doors for them, so it all comes out in the wash, right? I'm not making those examples up, either; those are his examples.

And then there's this:

"The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It's just easier this way for everyone. You don't argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn't eat candy for dinner. You don't punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don't argue when a women tells you she's only making 80 cents to your dollar. It's the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles." -Scott Adams

Wow. Just wow. To recap: He's comparing women asking for equal pay to the selfishness and unreasonableness of children asking for candy, or mentally handicapped people lashing out violently. He's saying that women's concern for pay equity is a petty desire levied by an irrational group of people, and he's also suggesting a very specific strategy for the men in the audience: Remember not to care.

If the above block of text reminds you of Dave Sim at all, that's because this rhetoric does exactly the same thing as Sim's in terms of infantilizing women and casting them as primarily emotional and irrational beings that men can only deal with by ignoring them most of the time, or sighing bitterly while turning up the volume on their sports game.

Women, amirite? To his credit, he recognizes that this is basically an insane comparison to make, but then not to his credit, makes it anyway. (Note: Saying something and then saying that you're not saying it doesn't magically unsay it.) He continues:

"I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I'm not saying women are similar to either group. I'm saying that a man's best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he's smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people. A man only digs in for a good fight on the few issues that matter to him, and for which he has some chance of winning. This is a strategy that men are uniquely suited for because, on average, we genuinely don't care about 90% of what is happening around us."

Adams' original blog entry (since deleted): http://tinysprout.tumblr.com/post/3713649989/scott-adams-dilbert-deleted-post

More commentary (and apparently a comment from Adams) here: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/24/scott-adams-to-mens-rights-activists-dont-bother-arguing-with-women-theyre-like-children/

haha omg

I can never tell when Scott Adams is serious and when he's trolling

If the above block of text reminds you of Dave Sim at all,

this was my first thought actually

Practically everything Scott Adams writes is dripping with about five levels of bitter, self-hating sarcasm, though, which makes it difficult for me to take this completely at face value.

Like, I would not at all be surprised if he was taking a Neanderthal tone in order to set up and pull the rug out from underneath people, which seems to go along with the shellshocked reactions some of these critiques are posting.

Having said that, I haven't read it yet so maybe the whole piece really is way out of step with his usual steeze, or just an epic failure in conveying appropriate tone, or maybe he is Dave Sim 2.0.

A woman had a show about bible secrets on the BBC the other week which was basically Chasing YooWHoo.

Adams since reposted the deleted blog entry and a "you are all idiots" followup. Perhaps downgrade from Dave Sim to Lileks territory?

what a weird guy

If any of you have a Salon account, could you do me a favor and head over to the articles by these binarian unibators and provide a link to my explanation of the Men's Rights controversy in its proper context?

I write material for a specific sort of audience. And when the piece on Men's Rights drew too much attention from outside my normal reading circle, it changed the meaning. Communication becomes distorted when you take it out of context, even if you don't change a word of the text. I image that you are dubious about this. It's hard to believe this sort of thing if you don't write for a living and see how often it happens. I'll explain.

(emphasis scott adams')

Dude has not been helping his case lately.

hoo boy

COMPANY WIDE MEMO: Looking like Adams is not long for this cubicle

he's in hospice care

the medbed didn’t help?

The Dilbert‘s Totally Nuts ice cream flavor from Ben and Jerry‘s was really good

Ben and Jerry's co-branded expansion era had some flops, but not many

https://www.ncregister.com/news/scott-adams-takes-pascal-s-wager-vows-to-become-christian

the medbed didn’t help?

https://media1.tenor.com/m/B8KbgdhKkiUAAAAd/theres-a-name-ive-not-heard-in-many-years.gif

bye-bye dilbert guy

ties at half mast today

https://blog.fantagraphics.com/dilbert-lets-you-and-him-fight/

LOL thanks for that Ward

sadly, this could have saved his life

https://i.ibb.co/d0Jffqd8/image.png

If you told me Kim Thompson and Gary Groth had a debate and asked me to guess which person I'd be in agreement with I'd have said Kim in a heartbeat and yet...

i know!!!

xp to frogbs: what a bizarre human being he was

Like yes, encounters predicated on assault have a strong tendency to turn violent, which is why one shouldn’t initiate every encounter with an assault

https://bsky.app/profile/posting.fan/post/3mccx7iqzjc2l
Stink Boy‬
✧@post✧✧✧.f✧✧‬
· 18m
I'm not saying you gotta hand it to Trump, but it IS funny that neither he nor his team had any fucking idea who he was

Trump clearly knew Adams' most important work was saying racist stuff on shows

is there anyone else who, in memorial posts, *only* mentions whether the deceased liked them or not?

everything about the way trump communicates is so weird.

https://i.imgur.com/B2F6Gn7.jpeg

the Biden body count goes up by one more ;_;

So long, Dilbert Man
It's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again

I hear he died like a dogbert.

https://i.postimg.cc/HxnQxCWh/IMG-7915.jpg
Cooked by the NYT app

oh yeah Dilbert was a huge sensation right up until he made those comments

oh so it's a good news day for once, nice

I'll give him this, Dilbert really was a sensation, the last newspaper comic strip to really take off like that. a year ago after he said something particularly insane I did go re-read some of that 96-99 run and you know what, they were pretty funny. it is of course very possible that all the punchlines were emailed to him by readers. but either way there's something kind of fascinating about what happened to the strip in its later years, as it almost felt like Scott lost his ability to detect irony. the set ups to the jokes were still fairly good, he could still write situations in which funny things could happen, but he couldn't recognize a punchline somehow. there were probably actual detectable physical changes going on in his brain you could trace back to whatever day he decided to make the pointy-haired boss thinner and smarter

I have sometimes experienced a... sensation... when I urinate, is that the same thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asok_(Dilbert)

world of contrasts, here. based on a former coworker but Adams probably misspelled his name, he refused to do much characterization and didn't acknowledge the character was Indian because (using his regular line about minority characters) "The world is far too sensitive to let me get away with a highly flawed minority member."

Asok later reveals he was taught telekinesis at the Indian Institute of Technology

much to consider

wait until you get to the sexual orientation section, it's a trip

I do recall the time he responded on Twitter to someone calling him out for never having a single black character in Dilbert, his line was something like "humor is based on character flaws and if I made a black person flawed then I'd be racist", one of those lines that's brilliant if he's trolling but he was serious. not that he seriously believed it but he did seem to seriously think this was a convincing argument.

Much later Dilbert actually did introduce a black character. Having never had to draw a POC before, and apparently forgetting that weekday strips ran in black & white, he messed up the shading which caused "Dave" to appear as a generic white guy. This inadvertently made the idiotic race baiting jokes he was using actually pretty funny. This was about 6 months before Dilbert got pulled from every newspaper in the country because he told everyone to "stay the hell away from black people".

I picked up some Dilberts after I had exhausted Calvin & Hobbes in my early teens and, well, a 12 year old isn't supposed to "get" office comedy anyway so I guess it's no big surprise I didn't find it funny, but...comics aren't just text and moving from a virtuoso like Watterson to this guy's scrawlings was a hell of a contrast. There wasn't even any punk rock energy or pleasing minimalism to his work, just a dude with no craft and no ideas.

I liked Dilbert because it was so rudimentary. no sentimentality or heartwarming character moments, just a bunch of assholes being assholes to each other. he didn't do Christmas or Thanksgiving or Valentines Day strips. it probably never even occurred to him to do one. either way, I think prime era Dilbert is pretty funny for a newspaper strip. his comedic timing was at least good for the format. I honestly think becoming successful and famous gave him some kind of brain damage. you could see it in Dilbert. the strip didn't decline because he kept doing jokes about staplers it declined because he lost the ability to tell a good joke. he forgot the constraints of reality which is bad news for someone who kind of doesn't believe in objective reality. I don't even think the Trump shit was about some dormant right wing tendencies it was him just trying to write something that would get people talking about him again. from what I remember his blog was wildly all over the place untl CNN picked up the "Dilbert cartoonist says Trump will win" shit. I mean this is the shit he does. I don't think he believes or even cares about the holocaust denial or creationism shit he was peddling before that. It was just him waving his arms and going "look at me I found a new angle on a controversial issue!! what if this changes everything???" when in reality his ideas were just the same ideas other famous dipshits had long before him.

in the Behind the Bastards episode about him they read some interview where he says he genuinely thinks he won't be remembered for Dilbert, but rather his books on religion. books which people who study religion and philosophy say are among the dumbest things they've ever read. he was so fuckin sure about that WhenHub app too, an app with four dozen features and no clear use case, exactly the kind of thing Dilbert was good at mocking once upon a time. I guess he was kinda right though, he maybe won't be remembered for Dilbert after all. at the end of the day his only reward was Trump saying "RIP to some podcaster who liked me".

every generation gets the percy crosby it deserves

if he wasn't dead I'd be afraid right now that he'd taken over frogbs's account. I think I was still reading metafilter when he pulled that shit over there and created a new account to praise himself

I think I wrote upthread that I was all-in on Dilbert and Scott Adams as a satirist up until I read The Dilbert Principle, where he revealed he earnestly believed that the secret to success was literally sitting around and wish for good things to happen to you. I remember thinking “this is some of the dumbest nonsense I’ve ever encountered” and then every time I tried to look at the strip after that, I couldn’t push the fact that it was coming from someone who had published of the absolute dumbest things I’ve here read, that he was taking his bully pulpit and just slinging enormous bags of shit from it like WE were the stupid ones.

I still liked the ice cream, though

xp that was so funny because it wasn't like he got caught because he forgot to log out of his main account like most sock puppeteers do, he got caught because the sock wrote in such a pedantic pseudo-intellectual style that it could only be the creator of Dilbert himself. he came off as exactly the sort of person who would do this sort of thing (20 years later people would refer to this as "giving JD Vance vibes") and it was pretty clear no random dude on metafilter would defend him in that way. he was probably so flabbergasted when he got caught.

xp that was so funny because it wasn't like he got caught because he forgot to log out of his main account like most sock puppeteers do, he got caught because the sock wrote in such a pedantic pseudo-intellectual style that it could only be the creator of Dilbert himself. he came off as exactly the sort of person who would do this sort of thing (20 years later people would refer to this as "giving JD Vance vibes") and it was pretty clear no random dude on metafilter would defend him in that way. he was probably so flabbergasted when he got caught.

― frogbs

in healthcare compliance we have a saying - "anonymizing data doesn't"

it's one of the reasons i'm such a ghost on the public internet. anybody who's at all familiar with the way i write is likely to be able to spot my writing from a mile off.

I think I wrote upthread that I was all-in on Dilbert and Scott Adams as a satirist up until I read The Dilbert Principle, where he revealed he earnestly believed that the secret to success was literally sitting around and wish for good things to happen to you. I remember thinking “this is some of the dumbest nonsense I’ve ever encountered” and then every time I tried to look at the strip after that, I couldn’t push the fact that it was coming from someone who had published of the absolute dumbest things I’ve here read, that he was taking his bully pulpit and just slinging enormous bags of shit from it like WE were the stupid ones.

― our beloved RIFF LORD (DJP), Wednesday, January 14, 2026 8:12 AM (twenty-two minutes ago)

there are so many people in the world like SA (i'm just gonna go with calling him SA), people who hear "positive thinking" and decide it means "self-delusion" lol

It's funny that he pivoted from claiming his success was from waking up early and putting effort into developing a comic strip or w/e and decided he knows The Secret and it's really just manifestation

I kind of suspect that happened around the time he thought success in one thing would translate to being good at other things and refused to believe that sometimes you just fail

It's weird because I also liked Dilbert as a regular teenage reader of the comics page in the newspaper (it honestly was better than 80% of that page) and at some point read The Dilbert Principle because it was lying around the house (I think my father got it as a gift at some point). I guess I must have read it assuming it was satire because it just seemed to me like it was making fun of self-help books (I should point out that I had never read a self-help book before). I also remember his weird alternative theory of gravity and I just read it as a fun thought exercise, it didn't occur to me that he believed anything he was writing. Only much later did I realize that he probably believed a lot of this stuff (or at the very least, later came to believe it).

It seems like he fell into the common trap of being successful in one domain and assuming that means you can be successful in any domain so started thinking that everything he thought of must be some genius idea.

there was a good podcast about him a while back, maybe you're wrong about? it's probably upthread somewhere.

Dilbert has always been bad and I still stand by what I said 15 years ago

Was I the only person who was put off by Dilbert from the beginning? The "capitalist servitude is the lolz" attitude just seemed like smokescreen for maintaining the status quo. Pointy-headed bosses will always rule, so put up with it.

Always felt that Dogbert was Adams' way of inserting himself into the strip a la Dave Sim and Viktor Davis.

― Stockhausen's Ekranoplan Quartet (Elvis Telecom), Thursday, April 21, 2011

at least Milton Waddams had the guts and inspiration to burn Initech down

there was an actual book arguing that very thing - "The Trouble With Dilbert" by Norman Solomon. the BTB podcast talks about it with a lot of reverence for Solomon, but ultimately concludes writing that sort of book was beneath him. regardless it really did seem to get under Scott Adams' skin and this was back when he was relatively 'normal'. he even dedicated a few of his daily strips to attacking the guy.

Behind The Bastards, that's it, thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nyEkHqP65c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdvElg2-tZA

I think the common thread for a lot of the Dilbert enjoyment might stem from the fact nearly everyone who liked it in the 90s in this thread was a teenager or younger at the time, or lacked a lot of experience in offices

I barely remember the cartoon, but it's worth noting how many people worked on that thing that had actual writing experience and they had to come up with so many things in order to tell a coherent story. There's just not a lot to delve into in Dilbert, because the characterization is so shallow. And all the details that did get added were odd because they catered toward a specific man's prejudices and irregular mind

Yeah, that's me. My dad had one of the books, but I don't think it was his thing really, he must have been given it. I remember some of it being kind of funny, but I was 14 and had no reference point

the Dilbert show was pretty stacked with talent, both in writing and voice acting. I know a number of Seinfeld folks were on it. they were pretty self-aware of the fact that it was based off such a flimsy premise. kinda like the Clerks animated show, not as funny though. but yes I know exactly what you're talking about, I was 12 or 13 when it came out and even then could recognize the jokes that Scott Adams himself contributed and how they broke up the flow of the show.

despite his griping about UPN and black people the studio was clearly angling for a hit and I remember them promoting the shit outta this. there'd be previews of the next episode during every commercial break of Futurama.

those shows were probably... fine.. but if you compare them to shows that kind of fizzled out due to network disinterest at the time like Mission Hill, they're kind of a half-baked mess

I watched that Dilbert TV show, downloaded all the episodes through whatever file sharing app was popular at the time. My recollection is that it was very uneven, some very funny and creative bits (the ones I remember are a repeating gag about sniffing dry erase markers and an episode about little elves living in the walls of the office that were literally downsized employees) and also a lot of if falling very flat.

god, Mission Hill was the fucking best