It's Not Funny If I Have to Explain It: A Dilbert Treasury

By Scott Adams

A hall-of-fame collection of the Dilbert creator’s personal all-time favorite selections, along with his own handwritten commentary about the strips. 

Jargon-spewing corporate zombies. The sociopath who checks voice mail on his speaker phone. The fascist information systems guy. The sadistic human resources director. The technophobic vice president. The power-mad executive assistant. The pursed-lip sycophant. The big stubborn dumb guy. They’re Dilbert’s coworkers, and chances are they’re yours, too. If you know them, work with them, or dialogue with them about leveraging synergies to maximize shareholder value, then you’ll recognize this comic strip as a day at the office, only funnier!

Since 1989 Dilbert has lampooned not only the people but also the accepted conventions and practices of the business world. Office politics, management trends, business travel, personnel policies, corporate bureaucracy, irrational strategies, unfathomable accounting practices, unproductive meetings, dysfunctional organizations, oppressive work spaces, silly protocols, and inscrutable jargon are all targets of Adams’s darkly goofy satirical pen. Dilbert strikes a deeply resonant chord with fans because it casts such a dead-on reflection of the realities of the white-collar workplace, even with its off-the-wall delivery. And now you can delve into Adams’s not-so-personal thoughts as he comments on his own hand-picked favorite strips.

“Once every decade, America is gifted with an angst-ridden anti-hero, a Nietzschean nebbish, an us-against-the-universe everyperson around whom our insecurities collect like iron shavings to a magnet. Charlie Chaplin. Dagwood Bumstead. Charlie Brown. Cathy. Now, Dilbert.” —The Miami Herald

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449417932

Scott Adams

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert, the comic strip that now appears in 1,550 newspapers worldwide. His first two hardcover business books, The Dilbert Principle and Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook, have sold more than two million copies and have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for a combined total of sixty weeks.

Book preview

For P.N.O., of course

Introduction

People always ask me which one of my books is the best. It’s hard for me to say because I loathe 90% of everything I’ve ever produced. The good news is that I’ve made so many comics that the 10% I love are enough to fill this treasury.

I handpicked every comic in here, according to a fuzzy, ever-shifting sense of what my best work has been in recent years. Mostly I picked the ones that make me laugh out loud despite seeing them a zillion times. There’s no guarantee that my favorites will be your favorites, but it seemed a reasonable place to start.

I also included comics that make me proud for some reason, e.g. they’re naughty or they offended lots of people. You might not think that those are sources of pride, but I have discovered that maintaining low standards for myself is a good formula for happiness.

You’ll see my handwritten comments throughout the book. They’re the sorts of things I might have said if you were reading the comics in front of me and I felt compelled to ruin your experience by talking while you did it. It works best if you read the comic first and then the comment.

If you want to become a cartoonist yourself, you’ll see lots of patterns and tips in here that could be useful. There’s some risk that by revealing my secrets, a thousand people will become cartoonists and push me off the comic pages, and then my business manager would confess that he has stolen all my money, and then I would end up living in my car and selling my blood to buy crack. However, I think the chances of that are slim because I don’t have a business manager.

Scott Adams

Reviews for It's Not Funny If I Have to Explain It

[readafew · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dilbert, one of the funniest (because it's true) comics of all time. I would like to have the full collection of the comics. Maybe he could start by making a book of the first 5-6 years of Dilbert like the Farside or Calvin & Hobbs.