Godspeed, Scott Adams

Scott Adams was one of America's premier cartoonist whose thoughtful and humorous insights came out in his comic strip "Dilbert," and later his podcast. Love him or hate him, his legacy will live on.

As a child of the 90s, I grew up reading Dilbert. The world-famous comic was my introduction to the corporate world, and I had been laughing over it from long before I was old enough and aware enough to even understand half the concepts, let alone to have any experience of corporate life. For me, Dilbert has always been there as a tentpole of my imaginative landscape. Characters, lines, and images from the strip serve as reference points in my brain to this very day (“You need a new kybard? What’s a kybard?” “JUST SIGN THE STUPID THING!”). A great deal of my own sense of humor was formed by the dry, sarcastic wit of the Dilbert cast.

The strip was a deeply cynical and deadly accurate skewering of modern corporate bureaucracy, centered around a hapless engineer named Dilbert who works for a nameless and soulless company alongside coworkers Alice (overachieving and underappreciated) and Wally (the slacker to end all slackers), under the oversight of their utterly imbecilic Pointy-Haired Boss. Meanwhile, Dilbert’s machiavellian mutt, Dogbert, uses his genius intellect and utter lack of moral standards to run circles around everyone else while acquiring vast wealth and power (“We’ll start with an exercise about trust. I want all of you to sign blank checks and give them to me”).

It was one of the most popular and influential newspaper comics of all time, practically synonymous with corporate life in the millennial era. There was a time when the only way one could enter an office without seeing Dilbert and co. taped to every cubicle wall was if company policy forbad the comic...a situation noted and lampooned in the strip itself (“They’re not even funny!” “This one has our business plan”).

And now it is over. Dilbert has retired at last, and there will never be another comic. Scott Adams has passed away at the age of 68, following a battle with prostate cancer.

Adams, without a doubt, ranks among the very top tier of cartoonists, alongside the likes of Charles Schultz, Gary Larson, and Bill Waterson, all while working in a completely different tone and style from any of them. His art was minimalistic, but his writing crackled with sharp insights and brutally clever jokes that embodied the deep-seated malaise of the modern world.

My own impression of Adams the man was that he was one of a very limited school of public figures (Michael Crichton was another) who genuinely seemed to form and hold their own opinions about the world, rather than taking one that had been ready made for him. Agree or disagree with Adams, he always seemed to have come by his opinions honestly, because he judged them to be correct, not because he was trying to follow one side or another. This meant he was always worth listening to, whatever one thought of his views, and if he concluded he had been wrong on something (such as the Covid vaccine) he was in any case fully prepared to admit it.

In his comics, Adams presented a world of utter machiavellian cynicism, but he himself was not thoroughly cynical. He was simply intelligent and perceptive enough to see that much of the world around him is, and he gleefully skewered that in his art. He was, by all accounts, very generous with his time and in his devotion to his fans. Those who watched his podcast report that he continued record his daily podcast even in his last days, to the point of trying to do it on the very day of his death. A thoroughly cynical and machiavellian man does not do things like that.

Nor does a thoroughly cynical man risk his career by making public statements that go completely against the acceptable norm. A thoroughly cynical, machiavellian man would parrot what he thought the mainstream wanted to hear while continuing to sell his comics. Though, at the same time, a thorough cynic could not see the absurdity of the modern world so clearly as to turn it into hilarious jokes and achieve such success in the first place.

For, as most of the mainstream coverage of his death has made a point to note with undisguised vitriol, Adams was ‘cancelled’ a few years back for saying something unacceptable. Namely, that if over fifty percent of Group A do not think it is ‘okay’ to be a member of Group B, then members of Group B probably should avoid having too much to do with Group A, generally speaking. This is a thoroughly reasonable position to hold, so naturally it is beyond the pale for the world of today.

Suffice to say, this was enough to get one of the most popular comics of all time dropped from syndication. But Adams, rather than retracting, simply continued the series on his own private site, and as noted, continued to work and put out comics and podcasts almost until the very moment of his death.

I still have many of my old Dilbert collections, including one called Seven Years of Highly Defective People, which was a special retrospective on the series (very early in its run, as it turns out), and which included commentary by Adams scribbled into the margins.

One of them, on a comic featuring Dogbert trying to exploit a fake miracle for cash (“Saint Ted looks like a happy face...”) had Adams ruefully comment “If there’s a Hell, I’m going there for sure.”

I’ve often thought of that comment with considerable sadness since Adams announced his illness. I’ve prayed that it would not prove to be so.

I’m glad to say that, in his final message to the world, Adams announced that he had become a Christian and that he “Accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior, and I hope to spend eternity with him.” I truly hope and pray that Our Lord accepted him, as a great soul who spent his life searching for the truth and lampooning error in the midst of a very dark world.

May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace.

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