(Eventually, this will turn out to be about progressive spirituality — bear with me.)
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoon (and the Dilbert merchandise empire) has died of prostate cancer, at age 68. Cancer deaths are often unpleasant, not something you’d wish on anyone; I hope Adams’s death was better than unpleasant.
Adams left behind a very mixed legacy. The Dilbert cartoon was syndicated from 1989 until 2023. For perhaps the first decade, the strip often offered a fresh and funny take on what it’s like to be a lower-level white collar worker in corporate America.
I guess I can call myself a cartoonist, insofar as I drew a regular strip for the weekly newspaper of the undergraduate college I attended. My drawings were good enough, but my weakness was writing the strips. I depended on my friend Mike (who’s now a rabbi) to write the strips, but after he graduated I was unable to continue. I can write decent nonfiction prose, but when it came to writing comic strips, I was a failure.
Scott Adams was a wildly successful cartoonist, but he drew badly. His characters show no particular expression. Adams showed little understanding of how to represent three dimensional space. His writing was more interesting, at least in the first decade of the strip, because he managed to capture some of the frustrating aspects of corporate bureaucracy. His success as a cartoonist was probably due more to lucky timing than anything else. He came out with a strip that appealed to the white collar cubical worker at a time when there were lots of white collar cubical workers. Timing was the real key to his success.
But bad drawing and mediocre writing will only take you so far. By the late 1990s, Dilbert was getting repetitive. By the 2000s, none of the characters seemed likable; or maybe Adams no longer liked any of his characters. By the 2010s, the strip was plain boring, and often mean-spirited. I think what happened was simple. Adams quite his white collar cubical job in 1995 so he could work full-time as a cartoonist; soon after he stopped working in a cubical, he stopped being funny.
Furthermore, by the 2010s, Adams was becoming an unlikeable person. You can read one brief summary of his online sockpuppetry, trolling, and bad writing here; reportedly he engaged lots more bad online behavior. His bad behavior culminated in 2023, when Adams said in his podcast:
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with white people—according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll—that’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the –– away. Wherever you have to go, just get away. Because there’s no fixing this. This can’t be fixed.” [Expletive deleted by Dan.]
(Full disclosure: I admit I didn’t listen to the podcast myself; I depended on this transcription.)
This is bad enough, but Adams also seems to have become one of the least likable characters in his strip — the Pointy-Haired Boss. He founded Scott Adams Foods, which produced a frozen burrito that he called “the blue jeans of food.” This phrase is classic corporate gobbledy-gook, the sort of meaningless phrase that the Pointy-Haired Boss of the early Dilbert cartoons would have said. Adams actually became the unlikable character that he made fun of.
I told you that eventually we’d get around to religion. In the last few weeks of his life, when he was in hospice, he claimed to have converted to Christianity. According to TMZ, in a final episode of his podcast his ex-wife read a letter from him which stated “he’s converting to Christianity because of the ‘risk-reward’ calculation.” For an in-depth discussion of this philosophical stance, see Pascal’s Wager on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; but there is little evidence that Adams understood any of the philosophical complexities.
In any case, he did not say what form of Christianity he converted to. Since Christianity has a huge range of internal diversity, there’s no way to know what kind of Christian he thought himself. Dilbert had grown so mean-spirited in its last couple of decades that it’s hard for me to imagine what sort of Christian he was; nor did he give himself much time to actually live out his Christian values.
Well, I’m a Universalist, so everyone — even the Pointy-Haired Boss — gets to go to heaven. Speaking as a very poor cartoonist, I’ll only add: thank you, Scott Adams, for a half dozen good years of comic strip.
