Home > Dilbert
Dilbert is a popular American comic strip. Written by Scott Adams, the comic is known for its heavily satirical humor about a micromanaged office, featuring a software engineer as the title character and his clueless boss. 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.1 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.
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 mis managementManagement (from Old French, "menagement" "the art of conducting, directing", from Latin "manum agere" "lead by the hand") characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization, often a business, through the deployment and mani.
Themes explored include:
- Engineers' personal traits
- Lack of style
- Hopelessness in dating
- Attraction to tools and technological products
- Esoteric knowledge
- Lack of practicality
- IncompetentIncompetence is the condition of a person who is unable to properly perform his assigned duty. Incompetence is the essential ingredient of the Peter Principle, which states that in a hierarchical organization, every employee tends to evolve through promot and sadistic management
- Scheduling without reference to reality
- Failure to reward success or penalize laziness
- Penalising employees for failures caused by bad management
- Micro-management
- Failure to improve others' morale, lowering it a lot
- Failure to communicate objectives
- Handling of projects doomed to failure or cancellation
- Sadistic HRThe term human resources is variously defined in political economy and economics, where it was traditionally called labor, one of three factors of production. Its use within corporations continues to define common conceptions of the term. Modern analysis policies with flimsy rationale
- Corporate bureaucracy
- Stupidity of the general public
- Susceptibility to advertisingAdvertising is the paid promotion of goods, services, companies and ideas, by an identified sponsor. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy. Other components of the promotional mix include publicity, public relations, persona
- Susceptibility to peer pressurePeer pressure comprises a set of group dynamics whereby a group in which one feels comfortable may override personal habits, individual moral inhibitions or idiosyncratic desires to impose a group norm of attitudes and/or behaviors. Popular usage associat
- Gullibility in the face of obvious scams
- Third world countries and outsourcing ("Elbonia")
2 Characters
2.1 Dilbert
Dilbert is the main character in the comic strip. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an engineer. Although his ideas are typically sensible and revolutionary, they are seldom carried out because of his powerlessness. Dilbert usually has no visible mouth or eyes, and in all but the early strips his tie usually points upward. While Adams has offered no definitive explanation for this, he has explained the tie at least as a further example of Dilbert's lack of power over his environment. In more recent strips the mouth has been drawn on occasion when Dilbert is eating, surprised, furious, or nervous, and in the TV series his mouth is drawn when he is speaking. Many of the other "-berts" look very much like he does, with glasses and no mouth (with the exception of Ratbert).
