The Bewildering Descent Of Scott Adams And 'Dilbert'

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Scott Adams sat for his regular YouTube show last month with a plan to stir a hornet’s nest. He says he didn’t expect how badly he would be stung.

“I shook the box on purpose. I didn’t realize how much I shook it,” he told the Washington Post via text message.

On his February 22 episode of “Real Coffee With Scott Adams,” the creator of the “Dilbert” comic strip decided to embark on a much-criticized Rasmussen poll and promote some sort of it demarcation. He explained that black Americans are part of a “hate group” and urged whites to “stay away from blacks.”

The following weekend, his syndicate and publishers drifted far from him, cutting off business ties and halting future projects. So did hundreds of newspapers, including The Post, which dropped “Dilbert” from their pages.

Adams tells the Post that his comments on the day were intended as hyperbole, while claiming he was responding to a larger socio-political narrative. He doesn’t apologize for what he said in the episode – viewed more than 360,000 times – although he claims that he rejects racism. Meanwhile, in a follow-up podcast, Real Coffee, he called both white people and the press “hate groups.”

How many customers “Dilbert” still has is not known. On March 13, however, Adams plans to release “Dilbert Reborn” on his subscription site, Locals. The first strips will feature his character Ratbert as a “context-removing editor” at a media outlet that spoofs newspapers like The Post, he said via text message. (He declined a request for a longer interview.)

Once a ubiquitous source of humor in American culture, the comic about the lives of office culture’s beleaguered drones predated “Office Space” and “The Office,” capturing business cynicism and malaise and even finding its way into Adams’ satirical concept of corporate incompetence, “the Dilbert principle” in the national discussion. The strip appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers at its peak – rarefied air then populated by “Peanuts” and “Garfield” – and sparked a string of best-selling business books, a short-lived TV show, and merchandising lines.

Now, “Dilbert” has been banned from its long-standing mainstream distribution channels, resulting in an 80 percent drop in revenue, Adams said. For close observers, the story of Adams, 65, has taken a startling turn — albeit in a way that had been hinted at in recent years, with the cartoonist rebranding himself as a provocateur and routinely making headlines for his polarizing views on politics, race and other things made aspects of identity.

James Toler, who three decades ago, as a representative of his syndicate United Media, helped sell “Dilbert” to many newspapers, said, “I’m surprised at the speed with which Scott has fallen out of favor.”

From comic to cultural spectacle

At United’s Madison Avenue offices, Sarah Gillespie discovered something unique when she discovered “Dilbert” in the late ’80s while serving as Director of Comic Art. “The take on office life was new and purposeful and insightful,” Gillespie said recently via email. “I looked for humor first and art second, which was good with ‘Dilbert’ because the art is generally considered…not great.”

Adams grew up a fan of “Peanuts,” he told the Post, and was thrilled to hang out with creator Charles M. Schulz after joining United.

By 1990 United had signed several future stars including Adams; Robb Armstrong, creator of “JumpStart,” one of the most widely viewed flicks by an African-American artist; and Lincoln Peirce, creator of “Big Nate.”

“It was absolutely electrifying,” Armstrong said of the period, noting that new cartoonists “were excited about the opportunity that was presented to us.”

Peirce said: “I knew they thought ‘Dilbert’ would be their next game changer – something that could eventually join ‘Garfield’ and ‘Peanuts’ in the heavy hitter pantheon. The funny thing was that some of the salespeople really seemed to get ‘Dilbert’ and some didn’t.”

The young cartoonists attended a sales conference in Washington together. Armstrong — who once considered Adams a friend — remembered the creator of “Dilbert” as a humble presence who took up self-help books and courses at the time. “He was chatting with us about a Dale Carnegie class he was taking,” Armstrong recalled via text message. “He said it’s helped him tremendously and he’s comfortable speaking in front of people.”

“Strange to think about it now,” he said. “Actually, it’s not funny now.” (Adams later gushed effusively about a 2016 book by Armstrong, who was heartbroken last week overhearing Adam’s racist tirade.)

Amy Lago, the editor-in-chief of “Dilbert” at United from 1995 to 2002, recalled that as each new batch arrived in the mail from Adams, the laughter gradually swept from the administrative assistants to the executives’ back offices. “It wasn’t easy to translate that laugh into sales,” said Lago, now cartoon manager at Counterpoint Media. (She and Toler worked at the Washington Post Writers Group.) “The consensus among sales reps and even some executives was firmly against the Strip.”

“Scott Adams was on the phone complaining about the low numbers,” Lago said shortly after the start. “When I told him ‘Peanuts’ started with a tenth of that number, he was surprised.”

One The main objection to “Dilbert,” Toler recalled, was that newspaper editors felt the title character looked a bit like the recently introduced Bart Simpson. Another reason was that newspaper executives objected to Scott making fun of management.

“However, as those same managers walked through their buildings, it became clear that ‘Dilbert’ was very popular with employees in all departments, as ‘Dilbert’ strips were taped to the walls of cubicles in all buildings,” Toler said. By mocking the deal through completely unadorned panels, Adams carved a satirical and visual niche—a combination Toler found appealing.

In the mid-1990s, two developments proved crucial.

Adams was the first celebrity cartoonist to include his email address in the strip, Lago said. Readers responded in droves, encouraging the workplace storylines in “Dilbert” and offering him ideas. “This practice gave Adams and the syndicate something special: direct comments from readers,” Lago said. Soon, the syndicate reps were chock-full of “Dilbert” fan emails in their suitcases—an effective sales pitch.

Then, in 1995, Gary Larson and Bill Watterson ended their hugely popular The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, respectively. United Media sales reps worked on the phones. “I don’t remember the actual numbers,” Lago said, “but I would guess that ‘Dilbert’s’ sales list has doubled.”

Bill Watterson and other artists reflect on 1995, the year comics changed forever

Strip sales became a springboard that boosted Dilbert’s licensing and merchandise, as well as manual releases. According to HarperCollins, Adams’ first two hardcover business books sold more than 2 million copies. Adams’ bespectacled titular character was soon featured in office supply commercials as well as in a United Paramount Network animated series, voiced by Daniel Stern Dilbert.

Adams also liked to push the boundaries of traditional taste in family newspapers, including a strip about naming products with the punchline “Uranus Hertz.” Lago said she took the unusual step of providing replacement strips for newspaper customers who found the original strips objectionable.

In 1998, a formally dressed Adams in a ballroom in Pasadena, California topped the list and received the National Cartoonists Society’s prestigious Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist.

“At its peak, ‘Dilbert’ was fabulous,” said Mike Peterson, columnist for industry blog The Daily Cartoonist. “It was real eye candy and we needed it.”

A loyal reader at the time was future cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky (“Boys Weekend”), who became “oddly enough a huge fan.” as a youth. “I was like, ‘This is what adult life would be like!'” the artist said.

However, Lubchansky was among those who noticed noticeable changes in “Dilbert” at least a decade ago, even in drawing A 2016 comic titled The Fall of Dilbert. “His comics, oddly enough, revolved more around his own little grievances and was even sympathetic to the boss,” they said, noting that Adams began posting selfies of his abs to Twitter to deflect the debate.

“He’s been acting weirder and weirder in public over the last 10 years – and even if you read his ’90s comic book collections with his comments, there’s all sorts of anti-‘PC’ babble that’s always been there.” , said Lubchansky.

“I think society just stopped idolizing that type of guy.”

Adams’ polarizing opinions became public in a 2006 blog post in which he questioned the Holocaust death toll to illustrate his belief that news reports lack context. In 2021, he took to Twitter to defend actress Gina Carano, who was ousted from The Mandalorian for comparing being a Republican to a Jew during the Holocaust: “Fired for a Hitler analogy? Wouldn’t that standard of employment put us all out of work?” Adams wrote.

Some of his comments have been viewed as sexist. In a later-deleted 2011 blog post, he angered readers with a men’s rights rant, arguing that it’s not worth placating women for the same reason it’s not worth it, with kids and spiritually rationalize disabled people. “It’s easier for everyone that way,” he wrote. “It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.” Adams hinted in a later blog post that he was amused by the uproar his comments caused, but eventually apologized.

In late 2015, in stark contrast to veteran pollsters, Adams said he was almost certain Donald Trump would become the Republican presidential nominee and eventually president because of the New York businessman’s “persuasiveness.” He based his claim in part on his own training as a hypnotist.

Adams said in 2016 that he did not vote and does not belong to any political party, but since then he has sent mixed messages about his political leanings and blurred the lines between his genuine and satirical statements on Twitter and YouTube. In a recent episode of Real Coffee, Adams said he supported Barack Obama and Bill Clinton because “I liked having a smart president.”

Much of his Twitter audience felt he was using the tragedy for personal gain when, on the day of filming the 2019 Gilroy Garlic Festival, Adams asked witnesses to join WhenHub, a video app he peer-to-peer peer had created “Message Gathering Tool”.

Adams didn’t make big waves with a February 2021 comic that was fun among those who have received a coronavirus vaccine, but he ruffled feathers when he championed debunked claims that people who were not vaccinated fared better in a video shared by the Just Think podcast than those who had done so.

The 2020s also saw his political statements become more racially focused. In early 2022 he will tweeted that he would “identify as a black woman until Biden selects his nominee for the Supreme Court,” who the president had vowed would be a black woman. And in June 2020 Adams tweeted that when the TV show “Dilbert” ended in 2000 after only two seasons, it was “the third job I’ve lost because I’m white.”

(His claim has been widely disputed. When the show was scrapped, Adams told GroundReport that it was due to lower viewership and time slot changes. When he was fired from the now-defunct phone company Pacific Bell in 1995, he told reporters that was the case (because of budget constraints. And when he was fired from Crocker National Bank in 1986, he was one of thousands of other workers who were also fired.)

The “Dilbert” comics also adopted Adam’s views on race and identity through “Dave the Black Engineer,” a character introduced in a May 2022 strip. Although Dave is hired to meet management’s request for more diversity, he immediately declares that he identifies as white in order to prank the boss. In a strip released days later, the boss thanks team members for identifying as black to achieve “diversity goals.”

In September, Dave was asked to “identify as gay” to improve the company’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) score after he was promoted. And in October, a series of strips shows colleagues Dave and Tina being considered for a job to “meet DEI goals” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) despite knowing they didn’t qualify.

Addressing the context for his recent racist tirade, Adams wrote The Post, “The real story is the narrative poisoning that comes from ESG, CRT, DEI,” also referencing critical race theory.

Adams has repeatedly expected his tweets or live streams to reach him “cancelled.” And finally, on his February 22nd stream, his statements became too inflammatory to ignore. He responded to a Rasmussen survey In it, Americans were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement “It’s okay to be White”. Adams said black Americans are part of a “hate group” based on the poll results, which showed about 26 percent of black people strongly or somewhat disagreed with the statement, and one more 21 percent were not sure. But the survey was criticized for it misleading because the slogan was popularized by white supremacists in a 2017 trolling campaign. Respondents who disagreed or were unsure of the statement may have recognized the phrase from its white nationalist context or were put off by the odd phrasing.

A poll asked if it was okay to be white. Here’s why the expression loads.

“As you know, I’ve identified as Black for a while, years, because I like being on the winning team,” Adams said on his YouTube livestream show. “But starting today, I will go back to identifying as white because I don’t want to be a member of a hate group.”

“I would say based on the current state of affairs the best advice I would give to white people is to stay away from black people… because there is no solution,” he added.

Adams syndicate and publisher Andrews McMeel Universal said his tirade was not in line with the company’s values. Another Adams publisher has announced that it will not publish its planned book, Reframe Your Brain.

Adams admits that while he intended to break the comments about his “bubble,” which encompasses some 135,000 YouTube subscribers, he was surprised by the scale and impact. He told the Post he was surprised that “abandon culture folks” were able to get to the “bottlenecks” that his various publishers were.

“I didn’t know Scott personally but what has become of him is so different from the man I thought I knew,” said Gillespie, who discovered him at United. “I am appalled and sad.”

Of the sudden loss of so much income, Adams said, “Politics are the reason for the cancellations.” But he seems undeterred. Celebrities such as Elon Musk and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk have come to his defense.

“Only the dying leftist fake news industry canceled me (for out-of-context news, of course)”, Adams tweeted on Thursday. “Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life has improved. I’ve never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback personally. Black and white conservatives firmly support me.”

The political polarization of a once-undisputed comic points to a much bigger problem than Adams, said Ruben Bolling, Herblock Prize-winning creator of syndicated Tom the Dancing Bug comic.

“So many in the MAGA sphere have been encouraged to drop their coded racism and make hateful statements that are becoming increasingly blatant,” Bolling said while nodding to Rep. Lauren Boebert, a far-right congresswoman from Colorado (whose representatives did not immediately send requests for comment). “It’s not just Dilbert. It’s Boebert.”

Meanwhile, Adams quoted a favorite quote on his Saturday show as he searched for his commercial perspective on the future: “In chaos there is opportunity.”