(Mark E. Johnson, Contributor) Scott Adams, the cartoonist who turned his frustrations as a corporate middle manager into Dilbert, a wildly popular comic strip lampooning workplace culture that ended abruptly when newspapers abandoned him following racist remarks on his podcast, passed away Tuesday at his California home at age 68.
His former wife Shelly Adams confirmed his death, according to the New York Times, noting he had been in hospice care. Adams revealed in May that he had been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and expected to live only a few more months.
For over three decades, Dilbert chronicled the ridiculous nature of high tech workplaces while mocking management culture. The strip featured its namesake character as a frustrated engineer trapped in a cubicle at a technology firm, accompanied by his intelligent, anthropomorphic dog Dogbert, who fantasized about controlling the world.
Supporting characters included workplace colleagues Alice, Asok and Wally, the incompetent Pointy Haired Boss, and Catbert, the fire red feline serving as the malicious human relations director.
During its height, Dilbert reached approximately 2,000 newspapers across the globe through syndication, placing it alongside other massively popular strips including Peanuts, Doonesbury and Garfield.
Adams published many Dilbert collections and authored business books, notably The Dilbert Principle, which argues that “the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage — management.”
The comic strip spawned a brief animated television series, stuffed Dilbert toys, computer games and the Dilberito, a frozen vegetarian burrito that failed commercially after several years on supermarket shelves. Dilbert starred in a $30 million Office Depot advertising campaign in 1997.
Adams’s political views eventually seeped into his comic strips. A 2022 strip showed a boss announcing that traditional performance reviews would be replaced by a “wokeness” score. When an employee complained the system could be subjective, the boss responded, “That’ll cost you two points off your wokeness score, bigot.”
Following his 2023 cancellation, Adams projected confidence on social media, tweeting, “Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out of context news of course). Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me,” according to CBC.
More than 1,000 newspapers terminated Dilbert after Adams made racist statements during his podcast in 2023, marking a dramatic conclusion to one of the most successful comic strips in syndication history.
Mark E. Johnson is in his 50th year as a writer for national news and opinion publishers including Headline Health, Mayo Clinic Press, Prevention, The Conservative Caucus, and many more.
