Dilbert

Okay, this is surprising. No love for Dilbert? Well, I'll just have to make some!

The comic strip sure does an interesting job of showing just how much it can suck to be an engineer. It may be a Parody, but a number of things shown in the strip could be considered Reality Is Unrealistic.

Am I the only one who thinks Elbonia could refer to Albania? The naming sounds similar, at least!

Occasionally Elbonia is used as sort of an Expy for North Korea, too—a hostile and reclusive, but small and backwards, country that Dilbert's company really shouldn't be exporting technology to.

Word of God is that Elbonia represents Americans' perception of all nations outside of America: backwards, ignorant, ridiculously intolerant yokels wallowing in mud whose primary import is Americans' charity money and primary export is human rights violations.

I've always found Dilbert to be boring. The jokes never seem funny, the art's downright atrocious, and it's never funny.

Holy shit, this comic goes back to 1989. They just made a joke about Gorbachev. Talk about Archive Panic...

EDIT: This one is pretty Hilarious in Hindsight, seeing as a smartphone basically is a 'watch that transmits voices and pictures.'

edited 30th Jun '13 5:25:15 PM by MidnightRambler

Okay, this was awesome. This is how you handle a PHB.

I don't get it.

ETA: I get it now, but I don't see the humor in it. I guess office humor just isn't my thing. But on the other hand, I really liked Office Space...

edited 12th Jan '14 10:49:43 AM by Twentington

Sorry to necro this thread with an uncomfortable subject, but at the time of this posting, Dilbert is trending on Twitter after its creator Scott Adams commented on how the cartoon got cancelled due to UPN wanting to lean towards an African-American audience.

However, in light of Adams as of late being perceived as a bad person for advocating our current president and now apparently blaming African-Americans for getting his show canned, some people have been firing back saying the Dilbert cartoon was canned because it was one of the least-watched shows on UPN.

Here's the thing though, they said it was one of the least-watched shows on UPN due to it being unfunny. As someone who watched the cartoon, I thought it was quite funny and thus, I was under the impression that the show got canned due to its sense of humor being more sophisticated than other programs at the time. Sort of like Rick and Morty minus that show's sci-fi edge and profanity.

So am I a bad person for still liking the Dilbert cartoon and still thinking it's funny, even when everyone else is saying the opposite?

As someone who has his own media that others disagree with when it comes to quality, I don't think you are a bad person for liking Dilbert. If you think it's funny, that is your right, regardless of how scummy the creator of the source material is.

No, you aren't.

Adams is bullshitting. I recall he used to say that it was because they put it in a bad timeslot (after Shasta Mc Nasty, one of the stupidest shows ever made) and then they put it right up against the NBC Must-See-TV lineup for its second season. That's much easier to believe, isn't it? So what changed between now and then?... I wonder...

(Doug Ten Napel has done the same thing. He implied Catscratch was canceled because of "left-wing politics"... of course, I can name people who were as conservative as him at Nick who had long, productive careers. Do you think he could be bullshitting for a reactionary audience? Gee, Davey...)

Anyway, a lot of the shitting on the Dilbert cartoon is most likely due to people who hate the creator taking a knee-jerk contrarian position. It wasn't the greatest thing in the world, but it could be really funny when it wanted to be, had a great voice cast, an ex-Seinfeld guy as the showrunner...

Edited by Aldo930 on Jun 29th 2020 at 9:39:00 AM

It could also be their legitimate opinion of the show. Comedy is subjective after all.