EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
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FUNNY PAPER
Scott Adams Burned a Hole in the Comics Section
FUNNY PAPER HAD barely settled back onto our sleeping-pallet of ancient color supplements from the New York Herald, to resume our HIATUS nap, when we were roused by an unimaginable clamor. Dilbert! a messenger cried out, Dilbert is no more!
It was true. Scott Adams, the sour and excitable crank behind the sour and torpid long-running office-gag comic strip, got himself disinvited from most of Dilbert's host newspapers over the weekend, because he had delivered a racist rant via YouTube. Today, his comics syndicate, Andrews McMeel, reportedly dumped him (their Dilbert page is now missing) and his non-Dilbert book publisher, Portfolio, canceled his upcoming book.
The particulars were excruciatingly dumb in a way that can only be achieved by someone like Adams, who decided long ago that he is a supreme master of esoteric logic, put on this planet to confound the dull, sheeplike masses with his slashing and transgressive insights—a perilous position for anyone to stake out, but especially for someone whose actual source of money and fame was that he steadily delivered a daily cartoon gag strip to the newspaper funny pages.
Adams had been spiraling toward the drain for years, caught up in his belief that Donald Trump was elected not because of the inherent flaws of the electoral college system but because of Trump’s exquisite understanding of the demi-hypnotic art of persuasion, of which Scott Adams was the ultimate interpreter, and under which each new grotesque scandal in Trump's doomed and corrupt presidency secretly tightened Trump's hold on the American heart. Adams also kept complaining about being discriminated against because he was white, while also working race-baiting gags into the strip.
His final glug down the plumbing started with a poll in which the Rasmussen polling company—a public-opinion-industry edgelord in its own right—decided to ask people if they agreed that "It's OK to be white." The respondents apparently weren't informed by the pollsters that "It's OK to be white" is a white nationalist trolling meme, but about a quarter of the Black people answering the poll apparently got the gist and voted against it, while another fifth said they didn't know if they agreed, leaving only 53 percent in the "agree" or "strongly agree" columns.
This proved to Scott Adams that Black people hate white people, which led him to declare that "the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people." Also he talked about how he watches lots of video of Black people committing crimes and takes it to heart. And then he—who even cares? No one ever wanted to hear what Scott Adams had to say about anything unless it was words in a balloon on a page, except he didn't even have the technical skill to draw balloons, it was just words floating above a little line from the speaker's mouth.
Now, it's not even going to be those. The New York Times wrote a news article about Dilbert's downfall, which contained the startling news from a New York Times spokesperson that the New York Times would be joining the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Antonio Express-News, et al. in dropping Dilbert: "The comic appeared only in the international print edition and not in The Times's U.S. edition or online, she said." Even the newspaper that doesn't run comics wanted to make sure everyone knew it wasn't running Dilbert!
Funny Paper salutes Scott Adams on achieving a genuine personal distinction: finding a way to forfeit a secure berth in the comics pages. Most of the established cartoonists can't even lose their spots when they die! Scott Adams' compulsive racism and bad judgment is more powerful than the Grim Reaper.
As one wise and funny observer tooted on Mastodon:
"incumbent writer of a newspaper funny pages comic" is one of the most lucrative and hard-to-fumble bags in the world and yet The Dilbert Guy has found the one way you can actually fumble it
Extraordinary as the debacle was within the funnies industry, though, it was also a familiar 21st century occurrence. Adams was reaching millions of people every day, but his regular platform still wasn't enough for him. Like Elon Musk—who predictably rallied to the cartoonist's defense with his own cosmic-brained ramblings about race and racism—Adams was consumed by the deranged need to win on the internet, where no one is a winner. His inability to win there, his failure to shout down the normies and the haters and the people who think racism isn’t cute, made him into a paranoid and vengeful loser.
The man who got rich off making fun of life's mundanities, and for a while in the '90s even made people laugh about those mundanities, ruined it all because he wanted to be special.
GARFIELD: Garfield sleeps the undisturbable sleep of someone who knows he'll never endanger the franchise.
CATHY CLASSICS: Cathy gets all dolled up for Irving, only to see Irving lavish his affection on the dogs instead.
MOTHER GOOSE & GRIMM: A judge tells Mother Goose, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse," to which she responds, with an eyelids-lowered smirk, "Then what is a good excuse of the law?" Funny Paper read this at least five times and each time got further away from understanding what it might be supposed to mean.
ANDY CAPP: Andy Capp comes home so inebriated that he can't remember where he's been.
BROOM HILDA: Gaylord preys on Broom Hilda's anxieties by making her worry that she worries too much.
PLUGGERS: A plugger gamely struggles with those newfangled abbreviations people use on their texting machines. FOH!
THE MIDDLETONS: Accidentally forgotten by Morris and Midge, Bumper goes on a nighttime rampage through the neighborhood's trash cans.
FUNNY PAPER is back on Hiatus.
Weather Review
New York City, February 26, 2023
★★ By the time the household stirred enough to open the shutters, full sunny daylight came in. The decision to pick up the knit hat off the desk and stuff it back in a parka pocket was a narrow and last-minute victory of tidiness over laziness; prudence didn't weigh in, because the forecast had the worst of the cold ending. So much for prudence: the new and milder weather had not come on yet, and everyone else's hats were still on and zippers fastened tight. Sidewalk dog turds had gone dry and grainy-looking in the frigid air, but the blood trail leading to a dead rat—its gory head thrust between the palings of a sidewalk planter—was wet and bright. In the short subway ride down to the West 60s, the sky clouded fully over. By the end of the first music lesson the temperature was no warmer and a chilly, hazy fog had crept in among the building tops, gray and raw. The dampness bit into exposed fingers until holding a hot coffee was only barely worth it. By the benches on the plaza outside the old apartment tower, blotchy pigeons glared and puffed themselves up and tried to sidle closer to the sandwiches. A woman arrived and began slinging handfuls of birdseed into the corner for them. After the second lesson, the temperature had crept up a little, and by the end of the trip uptown, the haze was turning lustrous, on the way to sun again. It was hard to summon the will to go back out after the miserable midday, but in the last hour before sunset the sky was cloudless and the paths in the Park were busy. Small dogs snarled at one another as their walkers reassured one another they were being playful. The amber-lit top of a building up and beyond the wall reflected in the duck-stirred ripples of the Pool. The gray flanks of the mallards shone. On the path leading above the western shore and out, a red-tailed hawk came audibly whiffing by at head height, mere feet away.
SANDWICH RECIPE DEP’T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of select sandwiches from The Daisy Recipe Book No. 2, Compiled and Arranged by the Daisy Bible Class, Hyatt Avenue United Church, London, Ontario, 1927, found in the public domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
RAISIN SANDWICHES
To make your entertainments unusual try some of these dainty sandwiches.
4 cup finely chopped stoned raisins
1 small cream cheese
Thinly-sliced brown bread and butter.
After chopping the raisins, mix them together with cheese. Cut slices of thin bread and butter, spread with the cheese, put together and cut into triangles and rounds.
If you decide to prepare and enjoy a sandwich inspired by these offerings, kindly send a picture to us at indignity@indignity.net.
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