Related Sites

Thriving on Vague Objectives, the latest Dilbert book

Dilbert animated series, episode 212

Dilbert is a popular American comic strip. Written and drawn by Scott Adams, the comic is known for its heavily satirical humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office, featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character. The strip has run in newspapers since April 16, 1989, spawning several books, an animated television series, a computer game, and hundreds of Dilbert-themed merchandise items. Adams has also received the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award and Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 1997 for his work on the strip. Dilbert appears in 2500 newspapers worldwide in 65 countries and 19 languages with over 150 million fans.

Themes

The comic strip originally revolved around the engineer Dilbert and his "pet" dog Dogbert, with most action taking place in their home. Many plots revolved around Dilbert's engineer nature or his bizarre inventions. These alternate with plots based on Dogbert's megalomaniacal ambitions. Later on, the location of most of the action moved to Dilbert's workplace at a large technology company, and the strip started to satirize IT workplace and company issues. The comic strip's popular success is attributable to its workplace setting and themes, which are familiar to a large and appreciative audience.

Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy for its own sake and office politics that stand in the way of productivity, where employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded, and busy work praised. Much of the humor emerges as the audience sees the characters making obviously ridiculous decisions that are natural reactions to mismanagement.

Themes explored include:

• Engineers' personal traits
  • Lack of style
  • Hopelessness in dating
  • Attraction to tools and technological products
• Esotericism

Announcement of changes in company password policy. From left: the Pointy-Haired Boss, Dilbert, Alice, and Wally

• Incompetent and sadistic management
  • Scheduling without reference to reality
  • Failure to reward success or penalize laziness
  • Penalizing employees for failures caused by bad management
  • Micromanagement
  • Failure to improve others' morale, lowering it instead
  • Failure to communicate objectives
  • Handling of projects doomed to failure or cancellation
  • Sadistic HR policies with flimsy (or purely evil) rationale
• Corporate bureaucracy
• Stupidity of the general public
  • Susceptibility to advertising
  • Susceptibility to peer pressure
  • Susceptibility to flattery
  • Gullibility in the face of obvious scams
• Third world countries and outsourcing (Elbonia)
  • Dilapidation
  • Bizarre cultural habits
  • Lack of understanding of capitalism

Characters

The main characters in Dilbert include:

Dilbert 

The main character in the strip, an electrical engineer. He understands engineering well and has good ideas, but has a poor social life.

Dilbert is a stereotypical technically-minded single male. Neither attractive nor blessed with tremendous social graces, Dilbert is capable but ignored at work, and struggles with his romantic life. While he is frequently seen having dates with eligible women, the dates almost invariably end in disaster, usually in surreal and bizarre ways. Dilbert loves computers and technology and will spend much of his free time playing with such things.

Dilbert is the strip's Everyman, albeit of a specific sort. Despite his intelligence, Dilbert is usually doomed to having events control him; he is generally powerless at work and too inept to improve his social standing.

Dilbert is usually pictured wearing a white dress shirt, red and black striped tie, and black pants. Dilbert's tie, for reasons never really explained, curls upward, as if formed by a wire. It is alluded to in the strip that the tie curving up indicates the fact he has not had sex lately. This was alluded to in a compilation of strips - Adams revealed that the day(or strip) Dilbert's tie was drawn lying flat was the day he had lost his virginity.

Dilbert's unusual name was suggested to Adams by a co-worker; Adams later found that the name likely came from a cartoon character used by the United States Navy during World War II.

Dogbert 

Dilbert's pet dog. He is a megalomaniac intellectual, planning to one day conquer the world and enslave all humans. Once he succeeded, but got bored and quit. Often seen in high ranking consultant jobs, he constantly abuses his power and fools the management of Dilbert's company. Dogbert also enjoys pulling scams on unsuspecting, and usually dull, customers to steal their money. However, despite Dogbert's cynical exterior, he has been known to pull his master out of some tight jams.

Dogbert's canine nature was more emphasized during the earlier years of the strip; as the strip progressed, references to his acting like a dog became less common.

Ratbert 

A rat formerly used as a laboratory test animal. He usually gets all the lowest and most menial jobs, i.e. temp. Ratbert is tolerated, but never liked, by Dilbert.

Catbert 

The company's evil feline Human Resources director. He derives sadistic pleasure from seeing employees worry about their jobs. Merely mentioning the term "layoffs" causes him to purr with delight.

Bob the dinosaur 

A dinosaur who is the wedgie enforcer at the office. He was found after Dilbert realized that dinosaurs weren't extinct, they were just really good at hiding. He hides behind the couch.

Pointy-Haired Boss 

The manager of Dilbert and the other engineers. He is hopelessly incompetent at management and does not understand the technical issue but always tries to disguise this, usually by using buzzwords he does not understand. The Pointy-Haired Boss's actual name is never used. In earlier strips the Boss was depicted as a stereotypical late-middle-aged balding middle manager. Later he developed his signature "pointy hair". This transformation occurred between the strip of September 20 (or possibly September 26), 1991, and the strip of October 21, 1991.

The Boss treats his employees alternately with disdain or neglect; he is almost wholly sociopathic, using them to his own ends irrespective of the consequences to them. The Boss's level of intelligence varies from near-vegetative to perceptive and clever, depending on the strip's comic needs; his utter lack of ethics, however, is perfectly consistent. The Boss believes Sociopath means the employees think he majored in Sociology; in fact he has alternately been credited with majoring in Art History (to look at naked statues) and Anthropology. The latter claim was made by the Boss himself.

Although he is often characterized by his minions as an "idiot", he alone among them has succeeded socially, by marrying and fathering children. Not unexpectedly, his son is much like him. He once lost a game of chess to a pineapple.

Wally 

One of the oldest engineers. He hates work and avoids it whenever he can. He is often seen carrying a cup of coffee. Wally is even more socially inept than Dilbert, and references to his lack of personal hygiene are not uncommon. Like the Pointy-Haired Boss, Wally is utterly lacking in ethics and will take advantage of any situation to maximize his personal gain while doing the least possible amount of honest work. Squat and balding, Wally is almost invariably portrayed wearing a short sleeved dress shirt and tie. Adams has stated that Wally was based on a man who was interested in a generous employee buy-out program -- for the company's worst employees. This had the effect of causing the man to work hard at being incompetent, rude and generally poor at his job to qualify for the buy-out program. Adams has said that this inspired the basic laziness and amorality of Wally's character.

Alice 

The company's most competent, and highest paid engineer. Alice has a huge, triangular hairstyle. She is often frustrated at her work not getting proper recognition, which she believes (with some justification) is due to her gender. She also has a short, often violent temper, sometimes putting her "Fist of Death" to use, even against the Pointy Haired Boss. Alice originally depicted a series of female characters, like Ted the Generic guy, and appeared for a time as the current Alice with a somewhat more normal hair style before, like the Boss, she finally developed her signature triangular hair. Alice is claimed to be based upon a woman that Scott Adams worked with named Anita, who is described as sharing Alice's 'pink suit, fluffy hair, and take-no-crap attitude.'

Asok 

Pronounced "Ah-shook." A young intern. He works very hard but does not always get proper recognition. Asok is intensely intelligent but naive about corporate life; the shattering of his illusions are frequent comic fodder. Asok is Indian, and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT). He does not eat, at least, beef. The others, especially the Boss, often unwittingly trample on his cultural beliefs. If Asok mentions this, he is normally ignored. If Asok's reported test scores and college accomplishments are correct, he is the smartest member of the engineering team.

Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light 

A minor demon who punishes people for small crimes by "darning them to heck" with his "pitchspoon", a parody of Satan. Ostensibly, Phil is eventually revealed to be the Pointy-Haired Boss's brother. Adams is inconsistent with his depictions of Phil; he sometimes has horns and sometimes does not, and sometimes carries a pitchfork rather than a spoon. Adams has stated that the inconsistency is because he sometimes forgets that Phil is not supposed to have a cape, or a pitchfork.

Elbonians 

People from a fictional Fourth World nation, used as a parody of outsourcing. Their culture is radically different from western culture, and their patriarchy often annoys Alice. Their country is covered in waist-deep mud which they keep wet using expensive bottled water as revealed in one strip.

Dilbert in popular culture

The popularity of the comic strip within the corporate sector has led to the character of Dilbert being used in many business magazines and publications (he has made several appearances on the cover of Fortune).

The Toronto Star, Montreal's La Presse, the Indianapolis Star, the Providence Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Brisbane Courier Mail, the Windsor Star, and San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications, run the comic in the business section, separate from other comics, which together have their own section. This is done in much the same manner that Doonesbury is now often carried only in the editorial section due to its pointed commentary.

It is the basis of a popular (though unproven) theory suggesting that the morale at a given workplace is inversely proportional to the number of Dilbert comic strips taped and posted at various desks and cubicles. A larger number of Dilbert comic strips reflects general frustration with the bureaucratic administration at the company, whereas a generally satisfied workforce sees less identification with the character of Dilbert, and consequently fewer Dilbert comic strips are displayed as mementoes. An office with no Dilbert strips, however, does not necessarily have high morale; rather, it may indicate that a truly authoritarian administration has prohibited employees from displaying them.

Criticism

This section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

The adoption of Dilbert as an icon for corporate America has led to Scott Adams being criticized, in some circles, for allowing his creation to be adopted and embraced by the very same corporate world his strip satirizes.

Dilbert's irony admits few serious alternatives to the corporate lifestyle, as if Adams anticipated criticism but planned through irony to disarm the critics. Norman Solomon believes the strip is insufficiently critical of CEOs and disrespectful of ordinary working people (The Trouble with Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh, Common Courage Press, 1997). The idea that white collar people might be in need of more respect contrasts with a common belief that white collar career is a free choice, but downsizing and some of the pressures on Dilbert have been predicted in the 1970s by Harry Braverman (Labor and Monopoly Capital, Monthly Review Press, 1998 being the most recent re-issue). Dealing with those pressures would require Dilbert to be more blue-collar in terms of strife over his work process, but in Dilbert the boss can be lampooned but has to be obeyed.

David Noble (Forces of Production, Oxford 1986) narrated the 1950's cyberstruggle over control of the programming of then-new computerized machine tools with a clear beginning (management introduces tools programmed by back-office Dilberts ignorant of shop floor requirements), middle (union men stand and watch the improperly programmed tools create "scrap at high speed") and end (management agrees that the union guys should do the programming). Solomon seems humor-challenged in his own book, but the irony in Dilbert, he feels, is a good way of avoiding serious confrontation over the best allocation of workplace control.

Peter Drucker and C. Wright Mills both pointed out the paradox on which the strip is based but does not address: Dilbert, Wally, Alice and the rest of the gang are at one and the same time supposed to compete with each other, and produce a collective product. The strip satirizes the victims of this double bind. Solomon's concern is that it reconciles people to their fate, and doesn't show them a way out.

The flaw in some of these criticisms might be the possible assumption on the part of their authors that people would use Dilbert as a role model, as opposed to merely finding it a one or two minute "funny" on a daily basis.

Language

Terms invented by Adams in relation to the strip, and sometimes used by fans in describing their own office environments, include "Induhvidual". This term is based on an American English expression "duh!". The conscious misspelling of individual as induhvidual is a pejorative term for people who are not in the DNRC (Dogbert's New Ruling Class). Its coining is explained in Dilbert Newsletter #6.

The strip has also popularized the usage of the terms "cow-orker" and PHB. The word "frooglepoopillion" is now occasionally used to describe an extremely large number, after a strip which revealed that the company for which Dilbert worked owed so much money that no name existed to describe the number, so the marketing department was promptly set to work on it, coining "frooglepoopillion".

Some fans have used "Dilbertian" to analogize situations in real life to those in the comic strip.

Management

In 1997 Scott Adams masqueraded as a management consultant to Logitech executives (as Ray Mebert), with the cooperation of the company's vice-chairman. He acted in much the way he portrays management consultants in the comic strip, with an arrogant manner and bizarre suggestions, such as comparing mission statements to broccoli soup. He convinced the executives to replace their existing mission statement for their New Ventures Group, "to provide Logitech with profitable growth and related new business areas", with "to scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings".

In order to demonstrate what can be achieved with the most mundane objects if planned correctly and imaginatively, Adams has worked with companies to develop "dream" products for Dilbert and company. In 2001 he collaborated with IDEO, a design company, to come up with the "perfect cubicle", a fitting creation since many of the Dilbert strips make fun of the standard cubicle desk and the environment it creates. The result was both whimsical and practical.

This project was followed in 2004 with designs for Dilbert's Ultimate House (abbreviated as DUH). An energy-efficient building resulted, designed to prevent many of the little niggles which seem to creep into a normal building. For instance, to spare time from having to buy and decorate a Christmas tree every year, the house has a large yet inapparent closet adjacent to the living room where the tree can be stored for later holiday seasons.

Media

Comic Strips

Books in bold indicate special compilations or original strips.

1. Build a Better Life By Stealing Office Supplies
2. Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless
3. Always Postpone Meetings with Time-Wasting Morons
4. Shave the Whales
5. Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy!
6. It's Obvious You Won't Survive By Your Wits Alone
7. Still Pumped from Using the Mouse
8. Fugitive From the Cubicle Police
9. Casual Day Has Gone Too Far
10. Seven Years of Highly Defective People — 1997; Strips from 1989 — 1995, with handwritten notes by Scott Adams
11. I'm Not Anti-Business, I'm Anti-Idiot
12. Journey to Cubeville
13. Don't Step in the Leadership
14. Dilbert Gives You the Business
15. Random Acts of Management
16. A Treasury of Sunday Strips: Version 00 — 1999; Color version of all Sunday strips from 1995–1999
17. Excuse Me While I Wag
18. When Did Ignorance Become A Point Of View?
19. Another Day In Cubicle Paradise
20. What Do You Call A Sociopath In A Cubicle? Answer: A Coworker
21. When Body Language Goes Bad
22. Words You Don't Want to Hear During Your Annual Performance Review
23. Don't Stand Where the Comet is Assumed to Strike Oil
24. It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It — 2004; strips from 1997–2004, with more of Adams' handwritten notes
25. The Fluorescent Light Glistens Off Your Head
26. Thriving on Vague Objectives

Business books

• The Dilbert Principle
• Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook
• The Dilbert Future
• The Joy of Work
• Dilbert and the Way of the Weasel

Other

• Telling It Like It Isn't — 1996; ISBN 0-8362-1324-6
• Work is a Contact Sport — 1997; ISBN 0-8362-2878-2
• Random Acts of Catness — 1998; ISBN 0-8362-5277-2
• Work—The Wally Way — 1999; ISBN 0-8362-7480-6
• Alice in Blunderland — 1999; ISBN 0-8362-7479-2
• The Boss: Nameless, Blameless and Shameless
• You Don't Need Experience If You've Got Attitude
• Access Denied : Dilbert's Quest for Love in the Nineties
• Conversations With Dogbert
• The Dilbert Bunch
• No You'd Better Watch Out
• Dilbert Meeting Book Exceeding Tech Limits

Merchandise

• Corporate Shuffle by Richard Garfield — 1997; A Dilbert-branded card game similar to Wizard of the Coast's The Great Dalmuti and the drinking game President
• The Dilberito, a burrito with 100% Daily Value of 23 vitamins and minerals

Animated series

Dilbert Title Card

Title Scene Intro

The Gruntmaster 6000

An animated series spinoff was started on January 25, 1999; it lasted two seasons on UPN before its cancellation. The first season centered around the creation of a new product, the "Gruntmaster 6000": episodes one through three involved the idea process, (The Name, The Prototype, and The Competiton respectively); the fourth (Testing) involved having it survive "Bob Bastard", and the fifth (Elbonian Trip) was about production in the famine-stricken fourth-world country of Elbonia. The product was finally tested by an incredibly stupid family in Squiddler's Patch, Texas, in the thirteenth and final episode of the season, Infomercial, even though it had not been tested in a lab beforehand.

The second season featured seventeen episodes, bringing the total number of episodes to thirty. Unlike the first season, the episodes were not part of a larger story arc and had a different storyline for each of the episodes (with the exception of episodes 29 and 30, Pregnancy and The Delivery). Elbonia was revisited once more in Hunger, Dogbert still managed to scam people in Art, Dilbert was accused of mass murder in The Trial, and Wally gets his own disciples in episode 16, The Shroud of Wally.

The entire run of the Dilbert animated series was made available on DVD on January 27, 2004. The DVD box set retailed at US$49.95 and included some special features including trailers and clip compilations with commentary by Scott Adams, executive producer Larry Charles, and voice actors Chris Elliot, Larry Miller, Kathy Griffin, and Gordon Hunt.

The theme music, The Dilbert Zone, was written by Danny Elfman.

Voice actors

• Daniel Stern as Dilbert
• Kathy Griffin as Alice
• Gordon Hunt as Wally
• Chris Elliot as Dogbert
• Larry Miller as the Pointy-Haired Boss
• Tom Kenny as Ratbert and Asok
• Jason Alexander as Catbert
• Tress MacNeille as Carol
• Jim Wise as Loud Howard
• Buck Henry as Dilbert's Dad

See also

• The Dilbert Principle
• Peter Principle, the opposite of the Dilbert Principle
• Plop: The Hairless Elbonian, a Dilbert spin-off strip
• Microserfs, a book about Microsoft employees

References

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Dilbert

Official sites

• Official Dilbert website
• Website for Dilbert's Desktop Games, by DreamWorks Interactive
• Dilbert's Ultimate House (DUH)

Unofficial sites

• National Cartoonists' Society awards page
• Complete list of Dilbert characters
• A detailed treatment of the word "Induhvidual"
• Searchable archive of text from Dilbert strips
• Dilbert Creator Fools Executives
• Dilbert Calendars
• The Knack
• Dilbert at The Internet Movie Database
• Dilbert at TV.com

Related Dilbert Blogs