Dilbert Gets Re-accommodated. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
Things and people continue to mess up in entirely expected but still
humorous ways in certain comic strips – certainly in Scott Adams’ Dilbert. The title of the latest Dilbert collection relates to one of the
few strips not set in the stultifying, soul-draining office environment where
Dilbert and colleagues usually dwell – it is set in the stultifying,
soul-draining environment of air travel instead. The reference to being
“re-accommodated” stems from one specific news story in which a passenger was dragged,
injured and bleeding, from his paid-for seat on a flight that the airline had
overbooked. But it is not necessary to remember that specific incident (the
tone-deaf, unapologetic airline really did say the victim had been
“re-accommodated”) to empathize with Dilbert when his re-accommodating consists
of being thrown onto the tarmac because he has a low-priced ticket and little upper-body
strength, being therefore of little value to the airline and having little
chance of resisting physical relocation. Of course, most of the time, Dilbert features soul-draining and ennui
(made funny) rather than anything as dramatic as being thrown out of an
airplane. The strip also features pointed and (to anyone who works or has ever
worked in a corporate environment) immediately understandable blame-shifting.
Thus, at one point, the Pointy-Haired Boss explains that the Sales Department
is blaming Marketing for low demand, so Marketing is blaming Engineering “for
making a product no one wants,” so the boss, being head of Engineering, shifts
blame to “customers for misleading us about their needs.” Anyone who does not
believe this sequence is taken from real life has not been living real life, or
at least not real corporate life. Another noteworthy sequence in this book is
based on Samsung’s unfortunate experience with Note7 phones that had a tendency
to, well, blow up, because of a battery problem. Adams did not make that up,
and he does not make any specific reference to the story here – but the implicit reference is very clear and
gets the usual Dilbert twist.
Discovering that the batteries in their phones explode, Dilbert’s firm first
decides to load the phones into a truck and park it by a competitor’s building.
Then Dogbert, in his occasional role as an overpaid and cynical consultant,
suggests a “Van Gogh strategy” to “convince people that having one ear is
cool.” But it is the bullet-headed CEO who comes up with just the right idea to
stop the bad press the incident has produced: after Dilbert suggests sending
media members the new, improved phone to show how well the company is now
doing, the CEO sends them the exploding model, claiming it is the new one, because, he tells Dilbert, “your way
left too much to chance.” Dilbert is
full of approaches like this. Another has the company launching a spaceship to
Mars filled with “our worst employees…just in case it explodes,” which means
“we have two ways to win and no way to lose.” Dilbert and his coworkers, on the
other hand, have zero ways to win and an apparently infinite number of ways to
lose. But that is what makes Dilbert
consistently funny – as long as you don’t think it is about your company or your corporate culture. Which, however, it probably is.
Speaking
of culture, there isn’t much of it in Sherman’s
Lagoon, but at least the underwater denizens keep trying. Perpetual schemer
Hawthorne the hermit crab, for instance, sets up various lagoon dwellers as
radio hosts, but then changes the station’s format and fires them all after
deciding “all bagpipes all the time” would bring in a bigger audience. Jim
Toomey introduces one of his periodic real-science elements in typical Sherman’s Lagoon fashion by having
Sherman swim to Angola to see “a weird jellyfish called the ‘spaghetti
monster,’” who explains that each of his tentacles has a different function,
including one “for obscene gestures.” Megan, Sherman’s better half, decides to
run a community fair to raise money for playground equipment for lagoon
dwellers’ youngsters, makes it clear that “volunteering is mandatory.” But
during the fair, she rejects crafts projects that do not seem lucrative enough,
because it isn’t the thought that counts, “it’s the cash.” The lagoon’s local
hacker and knowledge base, eyeglasses-wearing Ernest (how do those things stay on?), studies microscopic “tardigrades,” which
are (really) “commonly known as ‘water bears,’” and suddenly there are some
giant-size ones in the lagoon to tell the regular cast of characters, “you’re
all ugly, and you smell weird.” And then there is the family-oriented Sunday
strip in which Sherman shows his son, Herman, how to tickle hairless beach apes
(that is, humans) with a seagull feather to hear them chuckle, since “they all
laugh a little differently,” and it is all good clean lightheartedness until,
reverting to great white shark mode, Sherman says “we’ve had enough fun – let’s
eat one.” There is nothing in Sherman’s
Lagoon comparable to the corporate mindlessness in Dilbert, although readers may have a sneaking suspicion that
Hawthorne would do just fine in Dilbert’s world if he could only be a little less honest. After all, at one point he
says, “Full disclosure: every business I’ve tried has failed.” The business of
undersea humor, with occasional land-linked connections, seems, however, to be
doing just fine in Sherman’s Lagoon.
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