Scott Adams: The cartoonist who mocked corporate life

Scott Adams spoke for frustrated cubicle dwellers across the U.S. In his wry syndicated comic strip, Dilbert, the cartoonist lampooned corporate America’s inane, jargon-spewing middle managers in the 1990s and 2000s. Millions of readers saw themselves in the eponymous, potato-shaped protagonist, a powerless engineer who had to suffer through pointless meetings and moronic dictates from incompetent bosses. Dilbert was joined by a cast of recognizable office stereotypes, including the underappreciated Alice, cynical Wally, and the ineffective Pointy-Haired Boss. The strip’s success enabled Adams to write several semiserious business books, including 1996’s The Dilbert Principle, which theorized that companies promoted their most ineffective workers to management because “they’re the ones you don’t want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for
not doing their assignments.”

Scott Raymond Adams was born in Windham, N.Y., and as a “Peanuts fan” dreamed of becoming a cartoonist since the age of 5, said The New York Times. But he opted for a more pragmatic path: economics and MBA degrees and corporate gigs at Crocker National Bank and Pacific Bell in San Francisco. Dilbert emerged from Adams’ habit of sketching cartoons of his co-workers and bosses during “dull meetings” and faxing them to colleagues. In 1989, he secured a deal to distribute his work to 35 newspapers, but he stuck with his day job for several years, drawing the comic before commuting to the office. He finally escaped his cubicle in 1995, as Dilbert took off.

By the 2000s, Dilbert was ubiquitous, running in 2,000 papers internationally and spawning “books and other merchandise, desktop computer games, and an animated TV show,” said Rolling Stone. Adams, however, became increasingly controversial: He was “known for baiting progressives and proponents of political correctness,” said the San Francisco Chronicle, and “mocked inclusion and hiring quotas,” which he blamed for not getting promoted in his pre-Dilbert days. As he moved further right, he questioned the death toll of the Holocaust, became a Donald Trump supporter, made disparaging remarks about women, and called Black people “a hate group.” In 2023, the vast majority of papers carrying Dilbert dropped the strip. But his work left a mark. “My comics weren’t funny in the ha-ha sense,” Adams wrote. “But they reminded people of their jobs, and that seemed to be enough.”