Scott Adams (AKA the ‘Dilbert’ Guy) Keeps Finding New Ways To Be Awful

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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