Scott Adams Turns Cubical Mysery Into a Career

May 4, 2001 -- -- The stock market's sinking, unemployment is on the rise, and Scott Adams, America's No. 1 peddler of workplace misery, just keeps laughing.

The author of Dilbert — the cartoon hero of the office cubicle — says he has everything to gain when the economy hits a pothole. After all, a decade ago, when another President Bush was struggling on the domestic front, Adams single-handedly turned the word "corporate downsizing" into a punch line.

"Whenever the economy turns south I hear the cash register go 'Ca-Tching, Ca-Tching'," Adams says. "Whenever there is an unhappy employee, they will be feeding me information for Dilbert."

Wall Street's unprecedented bull run forced Adams to switch gears in the late 1990s. How can you write comic strips about your nincompoop boss in the good times — when workers are no longer trapped in their jobs?

Luckily for Adams, even in good times, work still sucked. Americans still needed Dilbert. "The Dilbert principle still applies. The dumbest people are promoted to management because competent people are needed to do the real work," he says.

"But with people changing jobs more frequently, and the world growing more complicated, you have dumber and dumber people doing harder and harder things — so for me, thank God, the workplace is still miserable."

The Dilberito Age

The socially challenged, potato-shaped Dilbert has seen his star rise. He and his Machiavellian pet Dogbert started out in 1989 with a meager syndication deal. Now, the strip appears in more than 2,000 newspapers.

Oh, there are signs that Dilbert has past his prime. The TV show on UPN fizzled after two seasons. And the Dilbert book collections don't quite sell like they used to. But the strip is still strong, running in more than 2,000 newspapers.

And there is a core audience that's sure to keep Adams at the forefront of the comic world. Dilbert paraphernalia — the coffee mugs, calendars, etc. — are still a solid franchise, so much so that Adams parleyed his popularity into the microwave-able fast food market — introducing the Dilberito.