Dilbert - Themes

Themes

The comic strip originally revolved around Dilbert and his "pet" dog Dogbert in their home. Many plots revolved around Dilbert's engineer nature or his bizarre inventions. Also prominent were plots based on Dogbert's megalomaniacal ambitions. Later, the location of most of the action moved to Dilbert's workplace, and the strip started to satirize technology, workplace, and company issues. The comic strip's popular success is attributable to its workplace setting and themes, which are familiar to a large and appreciative audience; Adams said that switching the setting from Dilbert's home to his office was "when the strip really started to take off." The workplace location is Silicon Valley.

Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy for its own sake and office politics that stand in the way of productivity, where employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded, and busy work is praised. Much of the humor emerges as the audience sees the characters making obviously ridiculous decisions that are natural reactions to mismanagement.

Themes explored include:

• Engineers' personal traits
  • Idiosyncrasy of style
  • Hopelessness in dating (and general lack of social skills)
  • Attraction to tools and technological products
• Business ethics
• Esotericism
• Incompetent and sadistic management
  • Scheduling and budgeting without reference to reality
  • Failure to reward success or penalize laziness
  • Penalizing employees for failures caused by bad management
  • Micromanagement
  • Failure to improve others' morale, lowering it instead
  • Failure to communicate objectives
  • Handling of projects doomed to failure or cancellation
  • Sadistic HR policies with evil rationale
• Corporate bureaucracy
• ISO audits
• Budgeting, accounting, payroll and financial advisors
• Stupidity of the general public
  • Susceptibility to advertising
  • Susceptibility to peer pressure
  • Susceptibility to flattery
  • Gullibility in the face of obvious scams
• Fourth World countries and outsourcing (Elbonia)
  • Dilapidation
  • Bizarre cultural habits
  • Lack of understanding of capitalism