In sad news, we're saying goodbye to Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. He tragically passed away at 68 after a battle with cancer, bravely describing that fight on his daily videos.

Whatever you think of the man outside the newspaper comic frame, his work inside it was exceptional: a great comic artist who taught the country—and me—the daily travails of corporate America through a handful of panels.

Adams built a strip that made millions of people feel less crazy about what they were seeing at work. Not because he revealed some secret. Because he named the obvious thing everyone was trained not to say out loud: the modern office can drive you insane.

Everyone likes quoting the movie Office Space, but Dilbert trudged through worse every day in newspapers nationwide.

Dilbert wasn't "office humor" in the way a lazy sitcom is workplace humor. It was more like a daily field report from inside the prison cell—how people behave when promotions, liability, and reputation matter more than truth.

The funny part wasn't that anyone was evil. The funny part was that nobody had to be evil for things to go wrong. One of the best strips Adams ever did was one where the boss claimed they needed more "eunuch programmers." To which Dilbert replies, "I think he means Unix, not eunuchs. And I already know Unix." The boss holds his tie and replies, "If the company nurse drops by, tell her I said, 'Never Mind.'"

Adams wrote like someone who had actually sat through the meeting. In the 1980s and 90s, he knew about the meetings that could have been an email before we even had that technology. The absurdities always creep in—one "alignment"phrase, one pointless task, one rule nobody could explain but everybody obeyed.

In Dilbert, the employee is usually competent, the system is typically incompetent, and the incentives are always undefeated. You don't need a grand conspiracy when you have a structure that rewards the wrong things.

This is partially why Adams clicked so well in political commentary, too. The absurdities Adams noted in corporate America are not that different from what you'll find in politics. Nancy Pelosi's infamous line on Obamacare that they had to pass the bill to learn what was inside it could have been uttered by Dilbert's clueless boss.

All anyone wants is for someone to point out the obvious thing to everyone so we can all laugh at it. Scott Adams was a master at that simple task.

And he had a gift for characters that felt like shorthand. Dilbert himself wasn't a superhero—he was a decent worker trying to survive. The boss wasn't a monster—he was a walking reminder that organizations often confuse confidence for competence. Dogbert, the cynical sidekick, was the unfiltered voice many readers kept locked behind their teeth.

That cultural footprint was massive because it wasn't passive entertainment. People used Dilbert in the pre-Internet era the way they use a meme now: as a safe way to communicate an uncomfortable truth. Those panels got pinned on walls, books, cars, and more.

And it wasn't just cynicism for its own sake. The strip carried a lesson about systems. If you reward appearances, you'll get performance instead of work. If you punish candor, you'll get silence. If nobody ever owns failure, the organization learns nothing and repeats the same mistakes with new branding.

That's not only a workplace point. It's a political one.

A lot of American politics is corporate dysfunction with better lighting. The same habits show up: jargon that hides the ball, meetings that replace decisions, narratives that matter more than facts, and institutions that protect themselves first because that's what they were built to do.

The week Adams passed away, we had a case before the Supreme Court where Democrats are arguing that male athletes transitioning into women should be allowed to compete against biological women. When asked to define what a woman is, the ACLU dodged the question. When Justice Alito pointed out that Title IX protections require us to know what women are to protect them, you could see the nerve sweat in liberals across the country.

It's an absurd set of questions the court is having to ponder, all because we have unserious people who have pondered nothing their entire lives. Adams would have loved skewing that interaction.

Adams understood something plenty of smarter commentators miss: absurdity isn't random. It's engineered. The dysfunction we see from corporate America to Congress and in the Supreme Court is all there because people put it there.

That's also why Dilbert hasn't "aged out" while offices and more have changed. The cubicle farm gave way to open plans. Then came remote work, Slack, Zoom, dashboards, and a new vocabulary of "culture" and "alignment." But the basic pattern—the pressure to perform certainty, the fear of being the one who raises the hand, the soft language used to cover hard truths—never really went away.

If I had to pin its role down in one comparison, I'd say Dilbert was The Office before The Office became a shared language. Same core insight, different delivery system: one was a daily strip that met you where you lived; the other became a whole genre built on the same recognition.

I realize we're talking about a comic strip. It's not investigative reporting. It's not philosophy. It's not a governing blueprint. But it was an art form that dramatically impacted people across generations.

Comedy is one of the ways normal people tell the truth in rooms where the truth gets you punished. Or at least that used to be true. Cancel culture being what it is, even jokes are fading - a point Scott Adams knew, too.

At the end of his life, he claimed turned to Jesus Christ and sought salvation. I hope that's true, and that he finally got rest from the awful disease that destroyed his life. His comics brought the world a lot of joy, and for that I'm grateful.