The Dyspeptic Genius of Dilbert

S cott Adams shared yesterday the sad news that he suffers from the same sort of metastatic prostate cancer as Joe Biden and that the 67-year-old cartoonist does not expect to live past the summer. That makes this an appropriate occasion to appreciate the genius of Adams’s long-running comic strip, Dilbert.

To my mind, there are five cartoonists on the Mount Rushmore of the funny pages. I’ve previously paid tribute to the granddaddy of them all, Charles Schulz of Peanuts, which ran from 1951 to 2000. The other four all emerged from the 1980s. Bill Watterson of Calvin & Hobbes walked most directly in the footsteps of Schulz, exploring the territory of childhood imagination with a reckless verve that made his strip the evolutionary Peanuts. Watterson’s sly social commentary was decades ahead of his time. Gary Larson of The Far Side specialized in single-panel absurdities and science jokes in a strip without recurring characters. Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County did more contemporary political humor — Doonesbury, if Doonesbury had been funnier and less doctrinaire.

And then there’s Adams and Dilbert. The strip launched in 1989, when Adams was a 31-year-old with an MBA still working in a cubicle, where he spent 17 unfulfilling years of his life working for a bank and a regional phone company. It focused on the corporate workplace. It grew into the first of the three great iconic pop-culture depictions of the soul-sucking cubicle-farm world of the 1990s and 2000s, the other two being the 1999 Mike Judge film Office Space and the TV series The Office, which began in Britain in 2001 and in its American incarnation in 2005, and has since spawned remakes in over a dozen countries.

Dilbert itself spun off not only numerous books but also a well-received animated TV series that ran for two seasons beginning in 1999. It was syndicated in thousands of newspapers in dozens of countries and is still produced today as a web comic after 34 years in newspaper syndication.

Workplace humor for grown-ups had graced the comics before, from Dagwood Bumstead’s blustering boss in Blondie to Jeff MacNelly’s boozy, ink-stained bird newspapermen in Shoe to Mort Walker’s military-base humor in Beetle Bailey, which shared a gentler version of Dilbert’s dim view of bosses, coworkers, middle-management petty tyranny, and the dysfunction of large institutions. Corporate America, too, had been a target for satires before (consider the memorable 1960s musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying).

But what was so fresh about Dilbert, and helped make it a sensation with Gen Xers entering the workplace in the 1990s, was its unflinching cynicism and misanthropy, combined with how Adams drew on his own experiences and a steady stream of reader emails to flesh out his critiques of the corporate world. For previous generations, a white-collar career was supposed to be a better version of the American Dream than blue-collar factory work — the thing for which a generation of kids were sent to college — as well as a peacetime refuge from the bureaucracy-ridden military service that defined young manhood in the 1940s and 1950s. But Adams drew a new and vivid portrait that stripped away those illusions.

The world of Dilbert was one of workplaces full of unattractive, self-interested, unhappy people in which nobody knew what they were doing, meetings were endless and pointless, management spoke in buzzwords they didn’t understand, nobody cared about the customer, people socialized with coworkers only to kill time, and nothing ever really changed or improved. The strip satirized every trend in the corporate world: reorganizations, mission statements, product development and launches, outsourcing, budgeting shenanigans, you name it. Built around a doughy, bespectacled, girlfriend-less engineer, it surfed the office and personal technology trends of the decades from the golden age of the fax machine to the era of smartphones and social media. Unlike working-class hero bards of prior generations, Adams made his workers little more sympathetic than their bosses.

From Schulz, Adams borrowed the gimmick of pairing his hapless loser of a protagonist, Dilbert, with an imaginative pooch, Dogbert, who was (like Snoopy) based on Adams’s own beagle. But while Snoopy was an optimistic dreamer who lost himself in Walter Mitty lives as a novelist, war hero, and campus cool cat, Dogbert is an amoral megalomaniac. His nemesis, the evil Catbert, is — fittingly — the head of human resources. If Charlie Brown was Schulz’s earnest, depressive alter ego in the strip, Dogbert is Adams’s voice: cold, calculating, ironic, and alienated.

When I was a young lawyer entering the workplace in 1996 (we didn’t have email until 1997), my office was nicer and my job more focused than Dilbert’s, but I recognized enough of the organizational humor to become a Dilbert devotee. My bookshelf to this day has ten of Adams’s book-length strip collections and five of his other books. I often find myself going back to favorite Dilbert strips. A few examples:

• Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss introduces a new “fast-track manager,” Ben: “Ben has no real experience but he’s very tall, so we know he’ll go far.” When Ben helpfully offers, “I also have executive-style hair,” the boss adds, “We think it will turn silver.”
• Dilbert stares blankly at a screen on a Monday: “Eight hours today and all I did is compose this memo. Actually, it’s more like a sentence than a whole memo. And it probably needs a verb to be a sentence.”
• Dilbert gets a draft back from his anti-motivated coworker Wally covered in sticky notes. Wally: “I made a few thousand suggestions on your first draft. Of all the pleasures of life, I think I like nit-picking the best!” Dilbert: “That could explain the break-up of your marriage.” Wally: “You wouldn’t believe what she thought was fun.”
• A bug-eyed coworker stands before Dilbert clutching a draft: “I’ve been working for five days without any sleep to finish this report. At first I had a mental block. But on the fourth day I was visited by an Incan monkey god who told me what to write. Now I just have to find somebody who can translate his simple but beautiful language.”
• Success in meetings is defined by having “a high bladder-to-brain ratio,” allowing a high tolerance for sitting still at length while nothing worth thinking about is said.

Later in his career, Adams turned to increasingly caustic MAGA politics that eventually got him blacklisted by his syndicate. The reasons why were always visible in his work, where career and personal life are both equally disappointing, and institutions are untrustworthy and inept. While Adams wrote with sympathy for the women in the often-misogynistic workplaces he portrayed, his strips were centrally about thwarted men who felt emasculated by the modern economy yet had little outside of work to bring them joy or meaning.

With his illness apparently bringing his long career to an approaching conclusion, we can appreciate the brilliance of Dilbert and why it resonated so strongly with generations of office workers, not only in America but around the world. Because most people do not live to work; they work to live.