Dilbert

Dilbert is a popular American comic strip. Written and drawn by Scott Adams, the comic is known for its heavily satirical humor about a micromanaged office, featuring an engineer 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.

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 alternated 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.

Related Topics:
Engineer - Megalomania - IT

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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 we see the characters making obviously ridiculous decisions that are natural reactions to mismanagement.

Related Topics:
Kafka - Bureaucracy - Busy work - Management

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Themes explored include:

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• Engineers' personal traits
• Lack of style
• Hopelessness in dating
• Attraction to tools and technological products
• Esoteric knowledge
• Incompetent and sadistic management
• Scheduling without reference to reality
• Failure to reward success or penalize laziness
• Penalising employees for failures caused by bad management
• Micromanagement
• Failure to improve others' morale, lowering it a lot
• 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
• Gullibility in the face of obvious scams
• Third world countries and outsourcing ("Elbonia")
• Dilapidation
• Bizarre cultural habits
• Lack of understanding of capitalism