Dilbert, RIP

A quick announcement for Charlotte-area Shedheads: Nic Brown, the guest on my latest SOUTHBOUND podcast, is doing a book signing for his memoir BANG BANG CRASH at Park Road Books this Wednesday at 7 p.m. Nic’s as good a writer as he is a drummer … and he is a very good drummer. Come listen to Nic and buy his book. I’ll be in the audience somewhere—stop by and say hi.

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Does anybody under 40 even look at comic strips anymore? I know a lot of young people read comic books, there’s a big audience for graphic novels and animation, and you can find comic strips online. But none of that is the same warm habit of picking up the newspaper and turning to the comics page. And when the comics were great, it was a thrill.

When I was in my twenties, we had a Holy Trinity of comic strips—THE FAR SIDE, BLOOM COUNTY and (most of all) CALVIN AND HOBBES. (I hesitated to link to those sites because once you dive in, you might never come back.) Over the years I clipped out hundreds of those strips and pinned them to my dorm-room wall, or taped them to my desk, or mailed them off to friends (not e-mailed: mailed, in an envelope with a stamp and a handwritten note.)

BLOOM COUNTY ended its run in 1989, and the other two stopped in 1995. But by then there was another strip I loved, not quite as good as the Holy Trinity but pretty damn close.

I’m sitting here right now looking through one of the DILBERT compilations I used to buy whenever a new one came out. The old strips are even more crudely drawn—Scott Adams made a lack of drawing skill not a bug, but a feature. The strips are still really funny. You probably know the setup: Dilbert is a logic-driven nerd in a soul-sucking office—Spock from STAR TREK with an engineering degree. All his bosses failed upward. His closest work friend is Wally, a Zen master of avoiding any actual work. Dilbert’s dog mocks him. His tie won’t even stay straight, curling up like a fishhook. Like a lot of good comedies, there’s tragedy underneath—is there a more melancholy figure in literature than Charlie Brown?—but from day to day, DILBERT had sharp jokes and a larger point about how the only way to survive office life is to make fun of it.

Scott Adams did good.

He also made a lot of money—at its peak, DILBERT ran in more than 2,000 newspapers. And at some point Scott Adams decided that who America really needed to hear from was not Dilbert, but Scott Adams. He started writing a blog. He jumped on Twitter all the time. He wrote a few books. He billed himself as an expert on persuasion. And five years ago, he created a YouTube series called REAL COFFEEE WITH SCOTT ADAMS.

The other day, on REAL COFFEE WITH SCOTT ADAMS, Scott Adams said that black people are a hate group and that white people ought to get away from them.

He based this opinion on a question in a recent poll where just 53 percent of black respondents agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.”

Now, it’s possible that even someone who pays as much attention to the news as Scott Adams might not know that the exact phrase “It’s OK to be white,” as innocent as it sounds, has become a catchphrase for white supremacists. I’d guess it’s fairly likely that most black people do know that, and might have answered that question accordingly.

It’s also possible that Scott Adams knew exactly where that phrase came from, and so did the pollsters, and Adams took a half-ass question from a half-ass poll and turned it into a whole-ass dismissal of an entire race.

In other words, maybe he used the poll as permission to say what he had always wanted to say anyway.

As the meme goes, “Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions.” Most of the newspapers that still carried DILBERT dropped him immediately, and others followed shortly after—as of Monday morning, he’s no longer in my local paper, the Charlotte Observer. His distributor dropped him and his publisher won’t put out his next book.

Adams, of course, complains that he’s been canceled. But I can’t think of a more clear case of self-cancellation. You can’t take a flying leap off a cliff while you broadcast it on YouTube and then claim somebody pushed you.

As this story developed over the weekend, I saw a bunch of folks bravely step forward to say they never thought DILBERT was funny in the first place. Maybe that’s true for some of them. Nobody likes everything. But I do think there’s a tendency for some folks to pretend they were always on the right side, even going back to a time when there wasn’t really a side to take. For most of DILBERT’s life, I knew little or nothing about Scott Adams. The strip always had some anger running underneath it, but I never really pegged it as white grievance until Adams came out in support of Donald Trump. And even then, I gave him a bit of a pass because Trump broke so many people’s brains.

Long story short, I enjoyed DILBERT for a long time and I’ll miss it.

Those of you who love the comics like I do probably know the story of Bill Watterson, the creator of CALVIN AND HOBBES. His final strip ran on the last day of 1995 and Watterson promptly vanished from public. He had been a private person to begin with, but over the last 27 years he has given a couple of speeches, written a couple of short pieces, and that’s it. Wikipedia says he’s still alive and 64 years old. I remember he lives somewhere in Ohio, but I don’t know what he looks like or what his positions are on politics or race or pretty much anything. Taking himself out of the spotlight might have been his final brilliant work. Scott Adams could have learned something from that.

Then again, he could have learned something from his own work. The DILBERT book I’ve got on my desk is titled IT’S OBVIOUS YOU WON’T SURVIVE BY YOUR WITS ALONE.