Did you just call someone "new money" ?

At least Zoe the cat looks to have it good, but I bet she has to hear a lot of stupid shit go down in that house.

How can this guy have fans? Who can overlook the bottomless pit of smugness, let alone enjoy it?

Boomers. Boomers is why this guy has fans.

Speaking of which, everyone I know who's a huge Big Bang Theory fan are/were also huge Dilbert fans.

Both of which I think are enjoyed thanks to a generation gap and ignorance of the reality of the subject.

Boomers had much cushier career prospects back when unskilled jobs paid well, basic computer competency wrote your meal ticket, pensions still existed, and the now quaint notion of permanent salaried positions were the norm. To them, poking fun at office politics is a cute, grand old time. To younger employees who have no such prospects or guarantees, it's too dismal to be funny anymore.

Boomers did not grow up with the internet. They have no idea of the reality of hardcore nerd communities. To younger viewers who did grow up with the internet, the jokes on BBT were played out 17 years ago on Something Awful and the reality of nerds like us is too ugly to be funny anymore.

"Nominal
Boomers. Boomers is why this guy has fans."

You misspelled "gen-X white collar office workers"

This guy loves to talk about his exotic sex life.

Garfield is the one you can blame on boomers. Dilbert is entirely the fault of thirty-something office drones in the late 90s who thought they were STICKING IT TO THE MAN by tacking strips up in their cubicles.

I think you're probably dead on about the reasons for which people are amused by Dilbert, Nom, and I think OZ also has a valid point about about the audience for the two things being from different generations. I'm sure there's plenty of overlap between the two, though, and a lot of the humor does seem to come from the same place. It feels telling that all my exposure to BBT has been on televisions in a nursing home.

Additionally, I'd say that the "point" of Dilbert seems to be that many people lead banal, unfulfilling lives where they are constantly victimized by petty, stupid bosses and pointless, frustrating, workplace bureaucracy, yadda yadda. Consequently, the subtext appears to be that Adams and his readers are above all that by virtue of the fact that they are genius visionaries who may or may not have received the recognition or success they think they deserve (enter smugness) in the workplace. It seems like the lesson of Dilbert is that to exist within a system that you loathe is okay, provided you can see it for what it is, believe yourself to be above it, and recognize your role in it. The goal is to use that awareness to play some kinda workplace metagame that helps you transcend your maggotdom and become a major or minor leader of lesser maggots. So the idea isn't necessarily that it's inherently bad to be a part of that system, it's just undesirable to be the one within it who happens to be exploited and shat upon the most...

Despising Scott Adams has been fun so far!

I used to like Dilbert as a teenager, and even bought some of the books. My favourite characters were Catbert and Ratbert.

I think I liked them because they were the nerdiest thing in the newspaper my parents got every day. I even subscribed to his e-newsletter to get it in my email (which in the mid-90s was pretty cool).

Nowadays being "nerdy" in the same sense is mostly normalized. Computers have been turned into appliances, so the usual indicators of nerdiness aren't a badge of honour anymore.

Either that or I had terrible taste. I also liked Archie comics, so apply Occam's Razor as you will.

I've never met a Dilbert fan younger than my parents' generation (boomers).

Aside from being libertarian IT monkey drivel, the banality of Dilbert to me is that zero effort was put into the premise. The concept for an observation would be there, but instead of presenting it with any kind of clever spin, Adams just blurts out smug crap like the observation alone is the punchline.

What really annoyed me about it was the "Dilbert date" sections. You'd swear the point of it was to make Dilbert look like the asshole, but no it was a genuine THESE DUMB BITCHES DON'T REALIZE WHAT A CATCH I AM manbaby weeping.

I think I was 12 when I realized how dumb Dilbert was, and I was SUCH AN UNRECOGNIZED GENIUS DAMMIT WOMAN WHY WON'T YOU DATE ME that all it took was looking at a book cover.

https://10deb7fbfece20ff53da-95da5b03499e7e5b086c55c243f676a1. ssl.cf1.rackcdn.com/db8123e2e4c804c2a0389cb4e485e489_xl.jpg

So I picked up another Bloom County book instead. Damn, 12 year old me had awesome taste.

I liked the dilbert animated series when I was younger, which was probably vastly improved by having writers other than adams massaging the material into something like a proto-'silicon valley' show.

don't think I ever followed the comic strip, but I did buy one or two compilation books like 20 years ago. Even the fairly short books were hit or miss, and that's compiling 'the best' from a lot of chaff.

Don't get the MRA undertones some seem to see in dilbert. At least from what I remember from a long long time ago, dilbert was unpopular with women because they would be incredibly bored by him and he was portrayed as genuinely boring to regular society.

Nom, I also fucking LIVED on Bloom County and Life In Hell from, I don't know, 5th through 9th grade. Bloom County maybe even 4th grade, Life In Hell somewhere early in 6th grade. It's too bad the original art for most of the Bloom County stuff seems to have been lost, all of the reprinted books are low quality scans. I've been building back my collection of the original books (which is easy because they're really common and cheap, except the first one that's like $10) because, ironically, the friend who introduced me to Life In Hell in 6th grade stole all my Bloom County books in 8th grade and I never got them back.



Dilbert on climate change, for people who didn't bother with the wiki article I linked earlier:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/File:Dilbert-2016-06-16.jpg

JF, I have a feeling Dilbert was probably better for a while there in the 90s, but either way don't feel too bad because I actually bought the fucking THATCH book back in 8th or 9th grade.

Maybe all libertarians are doomed to assume their initial success with a non-political thing means their political ideas are right and will be popular, a la south park.

Just do an image search for "dilbert comic dating" to witness the firepower of this fully operational MRA.

I think a reason Dilbert succeeds is that it gives office workers the false hope that they, too, can slap together a bunch of simple shapes en route to new careers as newspaper gag strip slingers.

Strips like Adam and On the Fastrack hinted at this direction, but wasted time on artwork. If Cathy could reach wide cultural penetration with nothing but "it's hard being a career woman while trying not to overeat" jokes, ACK! and Weeble people, there was nothing preventing Dilbert from being its points-to-schlong counterpoint.

So it's the Dane Cook Effect, where the object isn't putting on the best possible production, but to make the audience think, "Hey, I could do that!"

Mike Judge called, he said please stop dissing the source of his movie making career, but not too loud because shame.

I stayed at a motel in central Newfoundland a few years ago that was also a bodybuilding gym (you entered in the front, they shared a front desk and you would go one direction for hotel, the other direction for the impressively large weight room; the continental breakfast was served in the gym).

This place looks like a more expensive version of the room decor at that motel.

This place:

http://wavehotel.ca/