Scott Adams' Dilbert Says: Blow Me!
Humor is still, on a certain level, channeled hostility. Right?
“Hey. Have you been watching television? The riots in Egypt?” The animated versions of Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, stilted and robotic, moved on the screen.
“Yes I have,” said Bill Clinton. “I find it interesting that the world is following this with this universal solidarity and concern while you and I not having sex with a woman who weighs less than 250 pounds hardly warrants a mention. Where is the outrage for our plight?”
The audience murmurs, guilty chuckles. It’s at the Little Roxy in San Francisco. An alternative comedy deal but the video being presented by stone-faced presenters, specifically me and my Dr. Gonzo, Salvatore Russo, offers no sought clues as to how this should be received.
“It’s shocking,” Obama says. “Perhaps if we were to riot…”
“Is it a riot if it’s just the two of us?” Clinton asks, and for another two minutes and 20 or so seconds it unfurls. You see what we always hated about “comedy” is its compulsive drive for laughs. Which makes sense. When you go to buy toilet paper, you want toilet paper. Not sandpaper.
But what if your interest is in providing sandpaper when people ask for toilet paper? If your real and truest interest is to make that moment behind the mic where you, like the Joker, give the unexpected, and the uncomfortability it generates is worth more than any belly laugh in the world, and this is what makes you feel really and truly as though you’ve accomplished something worthwhile?
Saying that women demanding equal pay was like kids asking for candy was not the way to do that. Or rather, it was. Just that those of us who had liked him were chagrined that he had chosen stupid.
Sure, like Jules in Pulp Fiction suggested when talking about the guy Marcellus Wallace had thrown from a window — “I wouldn't go so far as to call the brother fat. He's got a weight problem. What's the nigger gonna do, he's Samoan.” — weight problems are not viable punchlines, because who wants to punch down? But the fact that it’s Clinton and Obama, that it ties into very real riots and life and death decisions, reduced to an American concern about lookism and getting laid works on so many levels that you probably will only get it if you can relax and embrace it. Like Proust or something.
Which is how I feel when this week I took note of the fact that one of my former contractors, a Mr. Scott Adams, he of the Dilbert strip, got his strip yanked from about 80 papers. Adams came into my orbit back when I was editor-in-chief of Intel’s corporate publication, Intel Leads. It was a sleepy, dry as fuck corporate rendering of doings throughout the massive conglomerate’s international holdings and if I had decided to do it like it had been done, I would have died the first week.
So it was pretty cool that there were no expectations and if there were, they were that I would fail. And if I was going to fail why not do so gloriously? I hired Mats Stromberg to do the first full-color cover of a gambling crazed, fedora wearing tout (see above) to talk about Intel’s appearance at CES. Mats work for me had previously involved rejected ads for OXBOW featuring same sex fellatio.
I also pulled in John Cleese of Month Python fame, and the quirky and relatively new Dilbert. Adams strip skewered the self-important Silicon Valley culture in such a sublimely wonderful way that you felt like he was laughing with, even if you knew he was laughing at.
Adams, himself, was a fairly genial guy. Vibed engineer and it felt to me like he was living a parallel life to the one I was leading at Intel: guys who needed to eat but couldn’t get the cooler parts of their lives to pay out so that they could move off of the soul-destroying portions.
But then something weird happened. Dilbert hit. Make that, HIT. It had always seemed popular in the San Francisco Bay Area but Adams was going national now, 800 newspapers and enough jack so that it ceased being a side hustle. You’d not know it to have him work for you. He always got his stuff in on time, and it was always funny for the same reasons I found anything funny: it made someone (my bosses) uncomfortable AND it was funny so win-win in my eyes.
[S]omething always starts to break and whether it’s Roger Waters backing Putin’s plays, Eric Clapton cursing out “coons” or Elvis Costello’s impolitic racist rant, there’s a certain sameness to the imbroglios.
I left Intel Leads, and forgot about Adams, outside of an occasional chuckle when happening on his strip somewhere else. The fewer newspapers you read, the less likely you were to see him. That is to say, I was barely aware of him online.
Until the headlines around him, both the tone and the timbre of them, had started to change. While his support for Trump was balanced by his support (sort of) for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his comparison of Biden to Satan made people…nervous? In the never-ending bullshit culture wars we are sunk knee deep in, it had become necessary to declare some Woody Guthrie shit: which side are you on boys?
Saying that women demanding equal pay was like kids asking for candy was not the way to do that. Or rather, it was. Just that those of us who had liked him were chagrined that he had chosen stupid. And there were other tone deaf notes, enough that you start to remember that very few are good for very long.
That is, something always starts to break and whether it’s Roger Waters backing Putin’s plays, Eric Clapton cursing out “coons” or Elvis Costello’s impolitic racist rant, there’s a certain sameness to the imbroglios. Well-heeled white cats, totally unforced errors and cliff dives into total fucking stupidity.
Like chickens crossing the road what bugs me more than anything is less what’s been said and more the fact that there was felt to be a need to say anything because, in the end, chickens rarely need to cross roads. Call me too much of a New Yorker — Adams is from New York as well. Just not New York City. — but the standard is always “mind your own business” and “quick time across time”. That is, I can make quick time across town if you’re minding your own business and not blocking my way expressing an opinion about shit that largely doesn’t concern you.
So this past week about 80 papers (and apparently a few ex-wives), dropped Adams. Cutbacks, which claimed the jobs of many others were the main reason given, but Adams maintains that it was his recent attacks on the wearisome bête noire of a certain kind of white guy (and Dave Chappelle), “woke culture.” Specifically ESG, environmental, social and corporate governance strategies he poked fun at.
I read the strips that it seems like he felt were the straws that broke the camel’s back, one in particular with a Black employee who self-identifies as white and I chuckled. But I also chuckle almost every time Henny Youngman said, “Take my wife…..please!”
In other words I am an easy audience but the questions move beyond my ease and into the standard that makes any of this worthwhile and worthy and reminds me of a friend of mine getting a call from David Bowie who while he was alive had some ongoing concerns and asked my friend, “Am I still relevant?”
Shocking that Bowie would ask. And great that he had asked a question anyone in the public eye should ask every time they open their eyes in the morning. Just to keep them from wasting their time, and ours. Because understanding relevancy is what makes things sing, enough so that when we ask “is it a riot if it’s just the two of us?” we understand completely what we could possibly mean.
That is, it’s NOT a riot if it’s just the two of us, and the connections between predictability and relevancy, won’t make it so.
So if the question is, is Adams worth “canceling”?
The answer, in this instance, has got to be: who?
But now let’s do some math: What’s 800 newspapers minus 80 newspapers? That would be, um…720 newspapers, yeah?
Man. Getting “canceled” has got to be tough. Here’s hoping dude can pull through. Yeah, here’s hoping dude can pull through AND that I can pay my mortgage next month. Since those things are, yeah, pretty much the same.