Many groups within the newspaper world are dropping “Dilbert,” the most un-funny syndicated comic strip known to man, and it has been a long time coming. After its creator Scott Adams made a slew of racist comments during a YouTube livestream on Feb. 25, giants of the industry such as The Boston Globe and The Washington Post have pulled “Dilbert” from their papers. According to The New York Times, Adams said ‘that black people were ‘a hate group’ and that white people should ‘get the hell away from them.’ What did we expect from the guy whose humor is dryer than the paper his comics were printed on?
“Dilbert” has always been garbage. None of the work created by Adams deserves to stand next to the other greats of the “Funnies” section, certainly not next to “Garfield” or “Blondie.” We can now at least have confirmation that Adams is indeed a racist bigot, but his comic strip featuring maybe one black character once in a blue moon was never doing him any favors.
A closer look past the latest headlines shows that Adams has a history of being problematic, stretching back to at least 2019. Mere hours after the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting had occurred that year, Adams decided to hop on Twitter and use the tragedy to promote his app, When Hub, according to another Times article. “If you were a witness to the #GilroyGarlicFestivalshooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use the keyword Gilroy. http://WhenHub.com,” the tweet read. It was not received well.
In this case, Adams made a weak apology saying that he would not do the same thing again, but that was a lie. In regards to the livestream, Adams instead doubled down and even encouraged other white people to be racist. According to the Times article, he acknowledged his forthcoming financial plummet. “Most of my income will be gone by next week,” Adams said. Let us hope it drains even faster.
Adams is a self-described “provocateur” and seems to thrive on doing and saying problematic things. Perhaps the fame he enjoyed during the ‘90s went to his head and now it is spilling all over the place in the form of nasty words and hateful rhetoric. His entire schtick has just been office satire for three decades, and “Dilbert” somehow got a short animated sitcom that lasted two seasons from 1999 to 2000. How it even lasted that long before being booted off its network is a mystery.
It is a good sign that Adams’ racist rant is being met with such swift action by newspapers. Within the realm of cartoons, racism is an issue that must be continuously spoken about because Adams is almost certainly not the only creator out there who ascribes to such harmful ideologies. Print newspapers may be suffering in the wake of the digital age, but comics are as immortal as words. It is important that papers support cartoonists whose work actually speaks to something greater than water cooler talk.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov via Pexels
