This may come as a surprise, but Dilbert is still a thing that exists. What will not come as a surprise is that its creator, Scott Adams, is still active in his campaign to be the worst person on the internet.
Adams has spent recent years working up a truly vile Twitter presence, dedicated to promoting all the worst right-wing talking points and encouraging his followers to engage in targeted harassment of people who criticize him. Despite the memory many millennials have of his work as being an excessively apolitical experiment in banality, his awfulness has popped up in his work over the years, especially in his commentary about gender and his depiction of “feminists.” (Let’s also remember that Adams has spent more than a decade loudly decrying the decline of rape culture and our growing recognition of the importance of consent.)
Adams has been working so hard and so long to plumb the depths of awfulness that it seems genuinely impossible he could find any new ground. And yet here we are. Here’s Adams’ latest toxic addition to the cultural discourse:
“Dilbert” creator Dilbert introduces first black character in 33-year run, introduced solely to hate trans people pic.twitter.com/sQpaLn1Cyc
— Lena (@banalplay) May 2, 2022
Where to even start with this? The fact that Adams thinks waiting thirty-three years to introduce his first Black character could be viewed as anything but an embarrassment for him? Or maybe it’s that the way he chose to promote this strip from his personal account was by tweeting “Let’s see if the world is ready for this” and predicting he would get “cancelled” over it, giving a clear indication that his intention all along was to try to court controversy.
Am I giving Adams the sort of result he was after with his attention-seeking nonsense? Sure. But sometimes this sort of obvious right-wing “victimhood-mining” goes so poorly that it needs to be put on display regardless. Literally anyone can look at Adams’ comic and see how gross it is that he waited more than three decades to introduce a Black character, only to do so for the sole purpose of mocking transgender people via the one joke transphobes have been sinking their feckless teeth into for what feels like an eternity.
waiting 33 years to write a black character & then introducing him as an admitted token doing double duty as the babylon bee’s only joke and confessing the endgame is cancellation martyrdom may be the best example of victimhood mining I’ve ever seen pic.twitter.com/NPKuks2O95
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 2, 2022
yes of course I’m being bigoted af but a ha! it’s a trap to prove a point how actually it is you who’s intolerant! checkmate libs
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 2, 2022
Except Adams couldn’t even get that right. Because as people have pointed out, he wasn’t “cancelled” and a lot of papers did publish the comic. But seeing as it’s a weekday, those comics are in black and white, which, well, certainly changes things.
Apparently Scott Adams didn’t realize weekday strips don’t print in color which accidentally makes this the funniest Dilbert in years pic.twitter.com/RnKlZH418d
— Critter Jams (@CritterJams) May 2, 2022
I saw this comic today and I thought the joke was that he WAS white 😬 : pic.twitter.com/0JN2g2Dyxl
— toadking/Eric (@ToadKingStudios) May 2, 2022
While a joke at the expense of both gender identity in general and the only Black character ever included in three decades of the comic is a desperate ploy for controversy, the black and white version appears to be a commentary on the incredible lack of originality over transphobes’ one and apparently only joke.
Still using the One Jokehttps://t.co/xAzm56ragV
— Casey (@CaptLaserPants) May 2, 2022
Leave it to Scott Adams to court controversy and mess it up so badly that his transphobic “joke” is not even really just useless but almost objectively funnier.
Published: May 2, 2022 05:51 pm