Opinion Scott Adams, the satirist of the corporate life
Of the 70 Dilbert-reading nations, many, including India, were adopting the first world workplace practices that Scott satirised. His career was peaking serendipitously even as national economies globalised, outsourced, and became Internet-driven
Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert. (AP Photo/ File) This is the second time Scott Adams is going away. The first was in 2023 when this iconic American cartoonist made racist remarks against Black people on his podcast. Over 1,000 newspapers worldwide and his syndicating agency dropped him without ceremony. He relaunched the strip as a webcomic but it had fewer takers. Now there is no comeback. The creator of the Dilbert comics died on January 13 of prostate cancer at 68 in California.
Back in 2023 when Scott tried to defend his hate remark, he did so by calling it hyperbolic — the normal stuff satirists do. That was typical Dilbert-speak — smart but fated to be received with disdain. Readers did to the cartoonist what Dilbert’s boss does to him routinely — half-hear and walk away.
Scott was a business graduate who took up a regular corporate job and rose to middle management by the 1980s. He found a unique business model for his cartooning passion right in his workplace. He mined the day job for a second career. Going beyond white-collar banter around the coffee machine, he found ways to talk about an overwhelming work culture.
Having found enough sub-plots to visualise everyday corporate life, Scott did nothing to dramatise the scene. He made the workday look oppressively functional. The familiar office space was even more lifeless in his panels, like movie props from a bygone Hollywood era. Set against cubicles that looked like cardboard cutouts, his characters moved like puppets. Every one of them, however, seemed to fit into a scarily plausible futuristic regimented corporate space.
The non-humans in the strip — Dilbert’s dog Dogbert and the cat, the devilish director of HR Catbert — behaved no differently from the barely human boss and Tina, the tech writer. Each was conceived as a distinct cubicle creature. Scott crafted them in measured even lines into geometrical forms that transacted in under-emoted speech balloons. This was strikingly new. A far cry from even Scott’s own inspiration, Peanuts.
Charles Schulz presented a cast of kids, their dog and a bird with a gentle touch rarely surpassed in comic art. Dilbert dwelled on utter cynicism. Again, Scott felt no pressure to follow the animated style of an incredible peer, Bill Watterson. Calvin and Hobbes sprang out of the page. The kid and his toy tiger were in perpetual motion. Scott stood unmoved. Like the best of comic makers, he created his own minimal world. Readers sat up, noticed and connected.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the three-panel daily strip was in 2,000 newspapers across 70 countries. This transnational spread brought glory and ironically the unforeseen undoing. For one so much into predicting, Scott missed the last. In The Dilbert Future, his bestseller on how to “thrive on stupidity”, there are 65 predictions across 250 pages. Sample just two: “In the future, the most important career skill will be a lack of ethics.” “In the future, your clothes will be smarter than you”. Glib one-liners, for sure. But the future is under no obligation to unfold smoothly. Scott didn’t notice the danger that was right there under his nose. In his expanding reader base.
Of the 70 Dilbert-reading nations, many, including India, were adopting the first-world workplace practices that Scott satirised. His career was peaking serendipitously even as national economies globalised, outsourced, and became internet-driven. This meant Scott got more readers across the world and they knew what he was talking about. They could, therefore, relate to his punchlines. Thank God uniform corporate norms were more globally practised than the UN charter.
Scott’s was a massive, enviable and diverse comics readership — multi-ethnic, gender- and race-sensitive more than ever before. This demanded matching sensitivity from the creator. Scott not only ignored the big picture, he did not even care for the African-American next door. His self-advertised foresight was further eclipsed by a new symbol of success, Donald Trump.
Scott was an early supporter. Perhaps predictably so. One characteristic feature of Dilbert is his necktie curved upward, a truncated presage of the extra-long presidential neckwear. While the whole world was sitting up and watching his work, it is sad that this brilliant cartoonist found reasons to back an off-and-on isolationist.
The writer is chief political cartoonist at The Indian Express. ep.unny@expressindia.com
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