The joy of Dilbert: Scott Adams brightened our lives by mocking everyday indignities
Scott Adams, the cartoonist who gave the world “Dilbert,” is suffering mightily in the final throes of cancer.
After he departs this vale of tears, his glorious BS radar deserves to be prominently displayed in the Smithsonian Institution. No one has a sharper ear than Adams for contemporary American bloviating.
The “Dilbert” cartoon strip was launched in 1989 and caught fire in the 1990s. For many downtrodden office workers, posting a “Dilbert” cartoon in their cubicle became a tiny flag of independence.
No corporate or social trend was safe from a Scott Adams smackdown.
“Our company is family-friendly and very green,” Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss explains to a job applicant in a 2011 strip. “If I get a chance to sell your kids for a handful of carbon credits, I’ll do it.”
Adams has left almost no Washington sacred cow unkicked.
A 2012 cartoon caricatured the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with Dogbert’s International Bank for Bailing Out Countries That Are Bad at Math.
A Third World despot clamoring for a handout complains, “Our Treasury is empty and we’re not sure why.”
Congress has had the same problem for almost 25 straight years.
Government surveillance spurred some of Adams’ best smackdowns.
Anyone who ever castigated TSA’s whole-body scanners will appreciate the 2016 strip in which Dilbert returns from poverty-stricken Elbonia and is told he appeared naked on TV.
Why? Because “the only television show in Elbonia is a live feed from their........





















Toi Staff
Sabine Sterk
Penny S. Tee
Gideon Levy
Waka Ikeda
Grant Arthur Gochin
Daniel Orenstein
Beth Kuhel