Scott Adams: When Cynics Go Bad (1 of 3)
They can't ALL vanish into Mexico, even when we wish they could.
Before I turn my attention away from Ambrose Bierce, I feel like I need to nod to that other great cynic identified with the letter D: Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. What’s happened to him should be a lesson to humorists of all stripes.
Once, Adams was one of the great satirists of America and the working world, arguably the most popular working cartoonist anywhere, with side gigs as a management and self-help guru. Even at the start of this year, he was a force, seen by an audience of millions every day in papers. He had another book due in September.
Now he is not much of anything.
Oh, he acts like his career is just entering phase two, like moving his strip behind a paywall and making it angrier and dumber is a brilliant swerve. And “uncensored Dilbert” may attract brief flare-ups of public attention. But his time as a fixture of American life is over. Outside America, he may be forgotten entirely.
If you scan the headlines, you might conclude Adams’ career blew up in one racist rant. But really, his fall was a long time coming. It involved many steps toward the precipice, some in his public statements, some in Dilbert itself. (The strip below, by Ruben Bolling in an imitation of Adams’ style, uses Adams quotes in panels 2-5.)
Still, there was a time when few would have guessed Adams would end up like this.
In the early 1990s, he was one of the most “plugged in” of newspaper cartoonists. He put his email in each strip so readers could contact him, then got a website when most cartoonists hadn’t even been online. Though it’s been poorly maintained of late, dilbert.com’s keyword-search feature was amazing, as good as any I’ve seen in my own webcomics career.
To readers like me, this made Adams approachable and down-to-earth, more so than other comic-strip artists, who viewed new technology with confusion or contempt. (Internet culture wouldn’t earn such contempt until many years later…and the always-online Adams now shares some of its unsavory features. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
I worked in office cubicles during Adams’ heyday, and I credit him with helping me understand how ridiculous and circular work culture could be.
I read a couple of his early books, including one where he describes the exercise of affirmations—writing down a prediction fifteen times a day to influence the universe (or at least your own mind) to make it happen. I followed this exercise with “I, T Campbell, will become a professional comics writer”…until I was one.
(Perhaps I should have tried the affirmation, “I, T Campbell, will make a consistent profit with my first comics series,” but that’s another talk.)
Adams’ influence seemed to peak with the Dilbert TV show. It fit the trend toward adult animation cresting in the late 1990s, and it seemed like a good strategy for new network UPN. Debut ratings were promising, and the main title, with music by Danny Elfman, won an Emmy.
But it lasted two seasons. After that…
Nothing. A few Web animations. Chris Columbus tried to make a movie. Adams’ circulation in papers rivaled those of Peanuts and Garfield, but a cross-media empire like theirs was not to be his.
Over time, he focused more on writing books. That meant taking his deconstructionist worldview—in which we’re all idiots, no one knows anything, and nothing’s worth worrying about that much—and applying it outside the confines of Dilbert’s cubicle hell, into every area of research and life.
I think that’s where the trouble started.
Next: Tracing the decline.