The Office Is a Beautiful Place When Everyone Else Works from Home

Dilbert #49

by Scott Adams

Everyone's favorite comic strip office worker returns in this dry, sarcastic, and utterly hilarious new Dilbert collection.

No one is more accomplished at making the drudgery of office work into comedy than Dilbert creator Scott Adams, whose landmark comic strip starring the downtrodden engineer have entertained millions of readers for the past three decades.

This collection includes hundreds of the most recent Dilbert comics starring Dilbert, his pointy-haired boss, lazy colleague Wally, temperamental Alice, maniacal Catbert, and misguided intern Asok, among many others.

Genres: Humor, Comics, Nonfiction

144 pages, Paperback

Published December 14, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Scott Adams was a defining voice of the American white-collar experience who transitioned from a prominent cartoonist into a polarizing political commentator. After earning an MBA from UC Berkeley and spending years in management at Pacific Bell, Adams launched the comic strip Dilbert in 1989. The strip’s sharp satire of corporate bureaucracy and the "Dilbert Principle"—the idea that incompetent employees are promoted to management to minimize their damage—resonated globally, eventually appearing in 2,000 newspapers and winning the prestigious Reuben Award. Beyond the funny pages, Adams explored philosophy and persuasion in works like God's Debris and Win Bigly, the latter of which analyzed Donald Trump’s rhetorical strategies during the 2016 election. His career took a dramatic turn during the mid-2010s as he shifted focus to his daily "Real Coffee" livestream, where he combined his background in hypnosis and corporate strategy to comment on the "culture wars." This period of independent commentary culminated in 2023 when he reacted to a poll regarding racial tensions with a series of inflammatory remarks. Labeling Black Americans a "hate group" and advocating for racial segregation, Adams faced immediate and widespread repercussions; hundreds of newspapers dropped his strip, and his publisher canceled his upcoming projects. Undeterred, he moved his work to the subscription-based platform Locals, rebranding his comic as Dilbert Reborn. In his final years, he faced severe health challenges, including stage IV prostate cancer and vocal cord issues, yet he remained a prolific presence on social media. He eventually announced the end of his hand-drawn work due to focal dystonia but continued to direct the strip's vision. Adams’s legacy remains a complex study in the power of branding, the evolution of digital influence, and the volatile intersection of creative genius and political provocation in the modern era.

Reviews

[Rod Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

The COVID-19 pandemic comes to Dilbert, so there are lots of gags about social distancing, working from home, and face masks. There's still plenty of space to skewer modern business culture and cancel culture too. When all these things make him angry enough to melt down, Dilbert actually grows a mouth and irises.

Dilbert remains familiar and reliable.

[David Allen Hines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes strips get stale, but Dilbert is not one of them. I've been reading Dilbert for many years, and I can say this 49th book in the series as well as the 50th, are among the funniest since the strip began! Scott Adams keeps the strip hilariously funny, well-written, well-drawn, and relevant. I like the fact he refuses to give in to the liberal cancel culture that tried to take his strip down in several newspapers when he dared to make fun of some of the current liberal dogma. This collection had me openly laughing many times, and it's rare at age 50 that I do that! There's a remarkable convergence between the self-imposed isolation of COVID and Dilbert's already long-existing love of isolation, and in several places this book plays that well, not to mention how COVID isolation makes it even easier for Wally to avoid work! Any fan of the series will love this collection!

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 still funny, but slightly less so. These books help me unwind before sleeping.

[Alexandre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been reading the Dilbert daily comics for almost thirty years. Very often, I find myself laughing at the absurdities of corporate life. As time goes by, I keep sympathizing more and more with Dilbert. In addition, I regularly buy the yearly collection of his comics. I read them voraciously, remembering past mores and laughing at them as if they were new.

The latest collection is one of the best by Scott Adams. He is sharper than never, dealing with the impact of wokeness and the pandemic on the daily life of ordinary workers, without forgetting the usual bureaucratic dysfunctions and personalities flaws. As Ricky Gervais once remarked, Comedy is a place where the mind goes to tickle itself. And Mr. Adams is not afraid to make us all laugh on the idiosyncrasies of modern life. Kudos to him.

[Ian Higgs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very nice to have a new up to date collection to read and particularly reflecting the Covid era. Very good as usual.

[Scott Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite silly, but has all the COVID comics as the pandemic hit, so Adams adapted the strip like we all had to adapt. Worth the laughs.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dilbert: The Office is a Beautiful Place When Everyone Else Works From Home (Dilbert #49) by Scott Adams (Andrews McMeel Publishing 2021) (741.5973) (3714).

In this collection of Dilbert cartoons, author/illustrator Scott Adams covers corporate office politics in the COVID era. These panels are hilarious as usual. Adams has set the bar pretty high, but he sees to it that Dilbert and the usual cast of familiar and infuriating characters clear the bar with ease.

These strips nudged me into recalling the insanity, the frustration, and the occasional hilarity that the COVID panic engendered.

In hindsight, it’s better to read about it than to live through it again.

My rating: 7/10, finished 1/7/23 (3714).

[Marsha Altman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one is a just a little more interesting than his others have been in the past decade because Covid begins over the course of it, so the characters change and so do the visuals. I was expecting Adams to be an anti-vaxxer, but fortunately he isn't, which is good because it would have made him insufferable. That said, the comic in general is really showing its age.

[SKP · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Dilbert, and I thought Dilbert during the pandemic would be hilarious. And mostly the cartoons included in this volume were pretty funny. But there were more than usual that didn’t really make me laugh. So I knocked a star off my rating for that. But the ones that did earned the other 4 stars fair and square.

[David Poon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The covid-19 edition of Dilbert reminds us of all the wfh zoom meetings we had to endure and the nonsensical demands of paranoid managers in the office.

[Michael Peeples · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many funny and true strips in here.
Another classic from Scott Adams - he must have hidden cameras all over corporate IT offices.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's odd to see books about covid which simultaneously feels so long ago and also yesterday since Melbourne had so many lockdowns.

[Cheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly more of the same but some pretty funny strips - especially around the pandamic.

[Federico Kereki · Rating 3 out of 5]

The start of the COVID-19 experience gets a lot of strips.