Dilbert - C or D?

I found it occasionally funny too back in the day.

I remember an ex-fan writing a blogpost about it, basically arguing that he'd lost his sense of irony somehow. I guess you see that in a lot of comedians who have been rich and famous for too long but what's happening with this dude seems different. it's not that they're bad jokes, it's that they don't resemble jokes at all.

I would guess his bout with spasmodic dysphonia might've had a lot to do with this. as much as I dislike him I wouldn't wish that on anyone. to a lesser extent I think getting humiliated with the whole sockpuppet thing a while ago was probably a factor. maybe the first time in his life as a famous person where his bullshit just stopped working and I don't think he knew how to handle getting made fun of. I say this because I believe Elon Musk's villain arc started the same way - he was always bad of course but I think he really started going off the rails when people started making fun of his dumb submarine

how many times has he been caught doing the sock puppet thing? I know he had a metafilter account for about five minutes before getting outed

All of these things can be true simultaneously. The early trips had some fresh stuff. The strip at its best was frequently entertaining, partly because he stole a lot of stuff from others. Then he slid downhill into Trumpy right-wing bullshit.

I don't think it's a mystery. I think it's just the journey of a man who started out with some promise, began to compromise when he ran out of easy material, then got mad and ugly when the well ran dry.

What would be more surprising is if he had been able to come up with 30+ years of fresh and interesting material. There are very few people who have been able to do that.

That said, good people whose work has run its course have the sense to bow out. He does not. Because he is not a good person. His wish to retain relevance has led him to be yet more terrible (as that gets a reaction, and any reaction is better than none).

oh there’s like 15 - 20 years of incredibly weird and questionable things before he got on the “Trump is a master persuader” wagon

the tiniest criticism, like “dilbert just normalizes unhealthy office dynamics and gives people an outlet to laugh at while accepting them” is something people brought up and a sane man would have said “well, you have a point but that’s what we’ve got” but noooooo

thats definitely true, again this is kind of like Elon Musk where he was clearly a thin-skinned weirdo all along but was a lot better at not making headlines for it

there was a good podcast on Scott Adams which pointed that out - back in 1998 the dude was on top of the world, Dilbert was the biggest comic strip in the country, he had a TV deal in the works, his books were selling a ton, he had structured his licensing deals in a way that was making him incredibly rich - and yet he couldn't get over that Norman Soloman book, one which as far as I understand isn't *really* about Dilbert anyway?

thats definitely true, again this is kind of like Elon Musk where he was clearly a thin-skinned weirdo all along but was a lot better at not making headlines for it

― frogbs

i'm pissy this morning

not making headlines for being weird when you're a cishet white man is pretty easy. you get a lot of benefit of the doubt. musk and adams had to really work to lose people's respect. if they weren't white men they never would have gotten to the levels of influence, power, authority, and respect they had

i don't think that dilbert was never _funny_. it was reasonably funny, in the early days. adams' draftsmanship was always poor. he was, you know, writing about his lived experience, and that kind of helps. i think someone upthread knocked that, that he was just telling jokes about his jobs, but i mean you gotta get your material somewhere.

That said, good people whose work has run its course have the sense to bow out. He does not. Because he is not a good person.

― CthulhuLululemon (Ye Mad Puffin)

i get lost when we start talking about whether "good people" or "bad people". that's just fundamentally not how i view the world. i don't think adams kept dilbert going because he was a "bad person". i think he kept dilbert going because he was a mediocre white man and he believed, probably correctly, that he was never going to do better than what he was doing

i mean is hank azaria a "good person"? fuck if i know. the simpsons has probably "run its course" four or five different times now. it's an easy job that he doesn't have to work very hard at and which pays reasonably well. i wouldn't say he's a "bad person" for not bowing out.

comic strip writers are weird. i mean. there's a long history of it. they do a lot of questionable shit. a lot of it finds its way into the comics. johnny hart, the last 20 years of bc, half the strips were just him evangelizing. i always found that super weird because "bc" literally stands for "before christ", as far as i know, and here are these cavemen talking about how amazing jesus is. i guess there's weirder things out there. but he was obviously a weirdo.

al capp, my god, al capp was this fucked up dude, like... just kind of monstrously bad. y'all wanna read that story sometime. after charles schulz introduced a minor black character into peanuts in the late '60s, hank ketcham decided to introduce a grossly offensive racial stereotype into "dennis the menace" and just went "What? What's the problem? I don't see the problem here", and it was apparently fine, as soon as he stopped drawing the grossly offensive racial caricature everybody acted like it'd never happened.

percy crosby, god, nobody today remembers percy crosby but his strip "skippy" was like peanuts before peanuts. just insanely popular. this cute little kid with wry philosophical observations about the world around him. there was a motion picture series based on it. some of the films in it won oscars. some company stole his comic strip's name and logo for their peanut butter. he sued them but lost.

anyway he started drinking more and more and the little kid started ranting about communism and how fdr was in league with stalin. they started becoming these huge walls of completely unhinged right-wing conspiracy rants. the strip went on for a surprisingly long time like that, people just pretending crosby wasn't a complete nutjob and hoping, i don't know, that he'd stop being a right-wing nutjob? this went on until december 1941, at which point fdr and the united states really _were_ in league with stalin and this guy going out here saying we'd made a terrible mistake and the person we really _should_ be in league with was hitler, well

whether any given person is a "good person" or a "bad person", i don't know, i don't care. what i do know is that it takes a _lot_ for a cishet white dude to face anything in the way of consequences for their behavior. a real, real lot.

Schulz would normally mention Crosby as a source of inspiration whenever he was interviewed.

The founding, popular American newspaper for this kind of right-wing editorialising is Little Orphan Annie of course, but it's part of a larger pattern of comics accommodating the (invariably reactionary) politics of the newspaper owners. Another means of persuasion.

The best ones were subversive, though.

musk and adams had to really work to lose people's respect

well yeah they earned every bit of the scorn they're getting but it's way funnier in Adams' case because, unlike Musk, nothing he does really matters, he was a newspaper comic dude who got real famous 25 years ago and has ridden that goodwill ever since. so like to rebrand your image as some kind of master manipulator who sees 3 moves ahead and then torpedo your career with some idiotic hypothetical that he somehow didn't anticipate getting taken out of context (dude is definitely racist but the thing that got him cancelled was more just him completely misreading a situation as he always said) is just really really funny to me

a few years back, I donated $1 to doctors without borders for every person who asked Scott to draw Dilbert as the joker. he had a huge meltdown and claimed he was being targeted by George Soros. he is an unserious, clueless dumbass who has no idea how the world works pic.twitter.com/U1tIWiVLt1

— the information pimp (@BirdRespecter) January 26, 2024

hopped on Twitter for some more context and uhh it's even weirder than you think

Laura Loomer and Scott Adams are convinced a stock image taken in the 1950s of a hand holding dollar notes, featured in an article about crime and inflation by the Atlantic that's also been tweeted by Alexander Soros, is in fact a coded call to assassinate Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/5SBt2ZvNXq

— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) January 22, 2024

Never noticed that "STATES OF AMERICA" was printed on the $5 bill until Laura Loomer circled it in red.

This does play into that piece someone posted yesterday about how Meth heads always think something big is about to go down

https://i.imgur.com/dNtdf6c_d.webp?maxwidth=500&fidelity=grand

It would appear that his only option is to go fuck himself.

dave sim is not only a better artist than scott adams, he's far better at being a batshit insane misogynist than adams is

like scott i'm an asexual pan lesbian with a breeding kink who loves girldick, what are you even talking about?

a few weeks ago there was some article making the rounds about how Republican men were basically undateable, guess that one rang true with a lot of these guys lol

Step 1: DEI
Step 2: Open Borders
Step 3: ???
Step 4: More Sperm!

Dilead

Legit lol, nashwan. Perfect.

(I had been thinking of working up something like HornDogbert, but your riff is so much better. Thank you for your service.)