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Andrew Gumbel The Independent SCMP 5 July, 2000 Copyright

Cartoon Character Assassination Dilbert is beloved of millions of overworked, underpaid and badly managed employees around the globe. But has the cartoon's creator Scott Adams sold out to the corporate world he satirises? And does he care? Andrew Gumbel reports It is a time of unparalleled prosperity in America. The economy -- recent hiccups notwithstanding -- is booming like never before. It has rarely been easier to find a new job, or to negotiate better terms for an existing one. So how come the country's most popular daily cartoon strip is about a browbeaten white-collar office worker whose only consolation in his meaningless existence is that everyone around him is as big an idiot as he is? Call it a mystery of modern capitalism, but Scott Adams' corporate anti-hero Dilbert, a nerdish engineer with granny glasses perched on his nose and ball-point pens poking out of his lapel pocket, has become quite a phenomenon. In the 11 years since he first appeared, he has weathered the end of the Cold War, the recessionary blues of the early 1990s and the long recovery of the Clinton era; through it all he has continued to attract more and more readers. Dilbert now appears in more than 2,000 newspapers around the globe, including the South China Morning Post, reaching an audience of as many as 140 million people. It's not that Dilbert is particularly penetrating, or witty, or even well-drawn as his creator is the first to admit. So what makes him so popular, this deadbeat loser amid so much gleeful prosperity? Scott Adams' answer to that question -- and perhaps the key to his success -- is that office politics is office polities, whatever the broader economic outlook. "No matter how much money you make, your boss can still be a nitwit. You can be rich and unhappy, or poor and unhappy. People are still idiots," he says. And he should know. Before turning to full-time cartooning five years ago, Adams put in 17 years of labour in a multitude of corporate cubicles, first at Crocker Bank, a major financial institution in the San Francisco area, and then at the telecommunication company Pacific Bell, where the high point of his career, as he likes to tell it, was moving into office space number 4S700R. "I spent the first half of my career being thoroughly incompetent," he admits cheerily. "And no wonder. I had about 20 different job titles at the two companies. I never stayed at any job long enough to be good at it. Finally I realised I was going nowhere and decided to chuck it all in." "It seems to me that the ultimate victory in life is to mock large corporations and have them pay me to do it while everyone watches," Adams writes. "To me, that's funny." In other words, Adams spent a good chunk of his adult life being Dilbert, or something very like him. he eve worked as an engineer -- Dilbert's job description -- for a while even though, as an economics and business graduate, he had absolutely no credentials for the job. "The truth is, I pretended to be an engineer." And so Adams joined the great American tradition of corporate satire, following in the distinguished footsteps of Billy Wilder's film The Apartment and Joseph Heller's bleak novel Something Happened, but employing rather blunter instruments than his predecessors: no more than a rudimentary talent for capturing blank facial expressions and a knack for recreating the crazy circular logic of the workplace with a certain satirical bite. When Dilbert achieved the first flush of success, Adams was hailed as a champion of the common office worker and a piercing critic of the corporate mindset. "When Scott Adams of Dilbert fame takes up his pen, he strikes a blow for overworked, underpaid and badly managed employees," the US News And World Report wrote as long ago as 1996. But that wasn't strictly accurate. "Actually," Adams joked a few months later," my only intention is for people to transfer their money to me." In truth, Dilbert was appreciated by bosses as well as rank-and-file workers, and even senior corporate executives at Xerox, which used Dukbert extensively in its in-house promotions. But could the strip really be a damning portrait of capitalism in its entirely, not just the idiocy of the middle managers? Certainly some people think so, including one Internet junkie who set up a Web site dedicated to the proposition that Dilbert was the second-coming of Karl Marx. Recently, a rather more dyspeptic interpretation came from one of America's leading business motivational gurus, Tom Peters, who held up Dilbert as the very essence of everything that stands in the way of the country's true entrepreneurial spirit. "Dilbert stands not only for cynicism. . . but the de facto acceptance of powerlessness. And that is where I draw the line!" he thundered, urging an end to the "tsunami of cynicism" overwhelming white-collar America and agitating for the launch of an entrepreneurial revolution. What seems particularly to infuriate Peters is Dilbert's failure to seize the economic good times, remaining stuck in the same old dismal work environment. The criticism has not gone unchallenged in the comic strip, and indeed peters has made the occasional appearance as an evil business consultant who spit when he talks -- a detail taken from life, apparently. "We demonise each other on a regular basis," Adams explains. An even more dyspeptic confrontation has pitted Dilbert against the left-wing columnist and media critic Norman Solomon, who sees the cartoon character as such a sellout to the corporations that he penned an entire pamphlet, The Trouble With Dilbert, to puncture him with instances of hypocritical bad faith. "More and more, Dilbert has become schizoid by design -- both a cherished mascot of oppressed workers and a valued marketing tool for companies oppressing them," Solomon writes. What the strip is selling to office workers is not insight but self-loathing, he argues, which makes them more docile and Dilbert-like, not less. Adams became so enraged by Solomon's pamphlet that he wrote a counterblast in his book, The Joy Of Work, in which he describes his nemesis as having squirrels living in his skull, and a fur-covered mushroom for a head that would be better employed as a pot scrubber in a large hotel. "It seems to me that the ultimate victory in life is to mock large corporations and have them pay me to do it while everyone watches," Adams writes. "To me, that's funny." No one who talks to Adams could mistake him for a socialist agitator. He makes no bones about enjoying his high earnings, or about his "pro-death" political leanings as well as pro-capital punishment. He lives in a large house on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay area, and manages his numerous investments, including a local restaurant run by his girlfriend. Where he parts company with Dilbert most radically is in his close attention to marketing. His success was arguably sealed when he persuaded the Wall Street Journal to publish part of his workplace manifesto, later published in book form, called The Dilbert Principle. That led to cover stories in Time, Newsweek and People magazine, as well as reams of corporate sponsorship deals. There's nothing unusual, of course, about marketing playing a key role in the success of a cartoon strip. It's just a bit odd when the marketing mindset is a key part of what the strip sends up. But Scott Adams is unapologetic about selling a product first, and content second. In fact, he is happy to admit Dilbert is not only badly drawn, but borrows so much from Peanuts it's embarrassing. Clearly, such provocative self-deprecation may be no more than another marketing ploy. But perhaps that is the point. To pique the attention of the uninitiated, Adams performs the same trick he pulls in his strip: a wryly amusing celebration of mediocrity. And there you have the whole Dilbert phenomenon in a nutshell.

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