Dilbert - C or D?

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

1. Adams has stated in his blog several times that evolution is a scientific fact. The citation someone gave here is in the context of his blog post explaining that the evidence for evolution smells wrong even if it isn't. That's an interesting point.

His prediction about evolution someday being rethought in scientific terms has to do with whether the arrow of time is an illusion. If time doesn't move forward, things aren't happening the way you think. That's an interesting point too. And it's a far cry from being an evolution denier.

^^^ certified genius I.Q.

so I guess the only requirement for claiming a genius IQ is smoking a lot of pot?

Well, he is in SF and all.

hahah this guy

in fairness, this is the funniest shit he's done in about 15 years

this makes me sad :-(

when i was a kid i read this book of prose fiction scott adams wrote called GOD'S DEBRIS in which a UPS guy delivered a package to an old man's home and the old man gave him this hundred-page-long speech about The Universe, which was mostly elementary einstein-era physics and probability theory with some stoney prognoses mixed in at the end and a whole lot of really odd categorical statements about obvious (like obvious even though i was 15 or whatever) personal resentments along the lines of "when an idiot and a genius disagree, generally the idiot will think the genius is wrong", and the whole thing had this utterly weird air of having been written by a person who'd decided that his respect for and understanding of Science and Rationalism was what separated him from the thick sea of morons who annoyed and obstructed him but did not actually have the intelligence or wit or generosity or even untainted curiosity to be an actual scientist and instead had to write boss jokes for the newspaper.

anyway the high point of this whole online thing is when someone on a reddit thread says that scott adams is dumb and scott adams under his ludwig von mises (lol of course) sockpuppet says:

You're talking about Scott Adams. He's not talking about you. Advantage: Adams.

dilbert is still one of the best daily strips, not that there's much competition.

Having dug a grave, he digs deeper.

Obviously an alias can be used for evil just as easily as it can be used to clear up simple factual matters. A hammer can be used to build a porch or it can be used to crush your neighbor's skull. Don't hate the tool.

lol

hoo boy

Dear Scott Adams,

You are on your own now, you big stupid nerd.

Middle-fingerfully,

DJP

I typed a vague rant of betrayal on behalf of teenage me, who mistook Adams' cynicism regarding clueless un-technical managers for some kind of anti-capitalist pro-science sentiment when apparently he was only ever yet another oblivious self-aggrandising jerk with an MBA, but then I remembered that it's already at least 12 years too late to give a shit. So.

(Admittedly I already sort of knew part of this from the final chapter of whichever 90s book where he tells readers to visualise good futures for themselves and write them out 100x daily to make them come true, but I guess a little part of me still wanted that to be some really weird trolling.)

oh hahaha I remember that; I thought it was the funniest fucking thing

doesn't surprise me to find the whole "men's rights" thing was done tongue-in-cheek, I used to read the Dilbert blog from time to time and I know most of what he says on there is not meant to be taken straight. this whole weird thing about him defending himself is bizarre, but he kind of admits on his blog that he doesn't really have much integrity when it comes to public forums. In a way I kind of understand why he did it, his blog is EXACTLY the sort of thing that people can take out of context and use to slam the guy, but explanation or not this whole thing is kind of disturbing

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.

Adams was equal parts Dogbert/Catbert/Alice/Wally IMO

it is definitely not questioning the status quo. and that's ok because it still has decent jokes.

ha that's actually a good point, I don't see how a strip that is basically "my job is soul-crushingly stupid and nothing I do seems to change anything" even comes under consideration as something that could be challenging the status quo

Guess I have a thin-skin when it comes to this, but I also work as a programmer. Too close to home?

well, I'm also a programmer; I always viewed the strip like the coworker who's always bitching

That would be another example of addition by subtraction.

wtf is taking so long

https://i.ibb.co/98q0Jg7/F6-L-Z-ZWMAAq-Moi.png

https://i.imgur.com/VUxAMtz.png

I found out recently that the offensive for nearly all possible ways Dilbert parody from the 90s, "The Dilbert Hole," was 1. Originally on rotten.com 2. Still up on archive.org because Scott Adams lost a legal action against it due to it being fair use

sitting here laughing about the fact that "Gamer Dilbert" has more readers than the actual Dilbert strip now

still in awe that this "master of manipulation" threw away the only thing that made him relevant just to say some incredibly racist shit as a HYPOTHETICAL, like genuinely one of history's greatest self-owns

out of curiosity I looked at some of his "Dilbert Reborn" strips and they are so bad, like Elon reply guy level humor. I swear he used to know how to write a joke

It's been discussed upthread, but he never knew how to write a joke. His early strips were things that happened in his last cubicle job, while the strips after that were things that happened to his fans (who would email him).

see I disagree with that. it's true that he's terrible at coming up with ideas and he himself admitted that most of them come from readers but if you look at some of those 90s strips you can tell he's at least familiar with the mechanics of a joke - there are actual punchlines there, sometimes they're even funny! I'd find some examples but it appears all the old Dilberts have been scrubbed from the internet, lmao

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.)