Farewell Scott Adams
I was surprised how much I was saddened by the death of Scott Adams. I was a big fan of Dilbert in the 1990s. I particularly like “Always Postpone Meetings With Time Wasting Morons”. The front cover has someone asking someone else “How Do You Do That?”. He replies “I’ll get back to you”.
That was the essence of Scott Adams comedy. Laughing at the shortcomings of people who you felt above. That isn’t maybe the most noble form of humour, but then humour is not a particularly noble thing much of the time anyway. Back then cartoonists weren’t really public figures. They are not really now I suppose. So I didn’t have any particular idea of the character of the author of the cartoons.
It felt to me that the world discovered Dilbert some time in the late nineties. I remember at one point my local bookshop had a whole table devoted to related books and merchandise. It seemed like there was a whole industry devoted to screen printing his image on mugs, t-shirts, notebooks, and even a Dilbert snow globe which had some joke I no longer remember with it. This was about the time when the author of the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons was turning down big offers to do the same with his characters on the grounds of it devaluing their artistic integrity. This clearly didn’t trouble Adams.
As time went on and the Internet grew, I became aware of Scott Adams the man. He turned out to be pretty much a 3-D representation of the 2-D world of his comics. He was very funny. He was very clever. Both of these traits make somebody attractive. Unfortunately, he always seemed to be under the impression that he was funnier and cleverer than he actually was. That’s much less attractive. None of this really mattered though. He was still producing the comic strips and I was still finding them hilarious.
In the 2010s Adams started becoming rather political. He claimed to have a unique political position. He was he said, to the left of Bernie Sanders on some social issues. And he was to the right of the Republican Party on many economic ones. Or something like that. I took his bipartisan claim at face value and decided to follow his coverage of the 2016 US presidential election. I don’t generally follow American politics – there’s very little point. They are too far gone. But I thought Adams would be a congenial gateway to it, as indeed he was. But I didn’t get what I expected.
Scott regarded himself as an expert on what he called ‘persuasion’. This was his term for optimum strategies for getting people to believe what you want them to believe – effective lying in other words. He trained as a hypnotist which he felt gave him a unique insight into human nature. He also claimed to have exceptional abilities to detect bullshit. This was the filter he applied to talking about politics. The other non-cartoonist thing he did was write and broadcast about self-help. He brought all this to his coverage of politics. This led to some quite unusual and interesting takes. In Adams’ terms, Trump was a master communicator with a unique skills deck. (One of Adam’s ideas was that it was good to have two not obviously connected strengths. For example, if you are both a great screen writer and great at making contacts you would do a lot better than someone who was good at only one of those skills.)
Scott’s admiration for Trump seems to have been genuine. It went back a long way and for a long time was not something that was helpful to Scott himself. It grew steadily and became so well known that Trump himself heard about it and invited him to a meeting. Scott found him impressive and charismatic in person.
As time went on Scott’s trajectory converged with the more mainstream MAGA stuff. But he always had a bit of distance from it. For example he professed to be open minded on climate change. And he would find fault with both sides of the debate, often in ways that were very funny. But he obviously never really took the subject seriously, which means he didn’t really believe in it. This might be simply because he never really got science. His comments on health related matters showed a similar lack of basic understanding. Even when diagnosed with the cancer that has just seen him off, he took the approach of following the conventional therapies but adding some woo options on top.
What he did take seriously was defending Trump from his detractors. I first noticed this over the notorious incident when President Trump was reported as suggesting injecting bleach might be a way of treating Covid. Adam‘s pointed out but that’s not literally what he said. As it happens, I had listened to the speech where this claim arose from very shortly after he made it. I was listening to the radio whilst busy doing other things and just heard the speech itself without any commentary before or after. I did not get the impression that Trump had made the suggestion that bleach with an effective therapy for Covid. Examining the transcript later, it is true that this is not what Trump said. But it was an incoherent ramble and clearly was evidence that this was a man without any idea of how to handle a health crisis.
According to Scott, the suggestion that Trump thought bleach would cure Covid was a hoax. It was a deliberate deception carried out by the media beholden to the Democrats. I don’t know if Scott actually coined the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” if he didn’t, it’s just kind of thing he might’ve done. This became a pattern and Adams used his sophistry to undermine some other criticisms of Trump. They were extremely poor arguments – I don’t think he believed them himself. In particular his attempts to excuse Trump’s cynical undermining of the 2020 election result were almost painfully poor. It was pitiful to see Adams using his talents in such a poor cause.
By this time I had pretty much given up my daily Dilbert habit, although I did seek it out from time to time. But I followed Adams on Twitter, a platform that suited him very well, and started listening to his YouTube series ‘Coffee With Scott Adams’. I had lost interest in the comic strip – the jokes were still funny from time to time. But it had settled into the same ideas and characters. Adams himself however was developing. He fancied himself as a self-help guru. He was a reasonable success at this, having an interesting take on things. But he was basically repackaging ideas that have been around for a long time, and his making them sound like they were his ideas was a bit tedious. But to be scrupulously fair, they may well have been ideas that he had had himself. He rarely showed much awareness of other people’s work. He was also getting deeper and deeper into the Trump rabbit hole.
One of his obituaries described him as a ‘disgraced’ cartoonist. This would have amused him. He was disgraced in the sense that his strip was desyndicated in a hurry when he made some racist comments. But if you had been following him closely, as I was at the time, you’d have known that this was something he carefully planned. He forewarned his followers that he would be deplatformed if he expressed some opinions in the wrong way, and that this would involve his words being taken out of context. He then proceeded to do exactly that. If you read the full text where he expresses his opinion that white people should avoid black people you will see that it isn’t as bad as the quick summary and the bit that is quoted would suggest. But read it carefully and you can see that it is artfully constructed to be misconstrued.
Basically Adams contrived to be cancelled. He probably regarded it as a clever marketing strategy in the attention economy. I imagine he was right. He certainly seemed to have a knack for turning his talent into money.
In the last couple of years he was a shadow of his former self. His daily hour long Coffee With Scott Adams was largely given over to repetitive demonstrations of his cleverness in analysing the latest events and giving them a right wing spin. This could be surprising and entertaining from time to time, but was increasinly tedious and predictable. I tuned in less and less. But by chance, I happened to open up his channel the day he died. Instead of the man himself, a tearful woman gave us the news that he’d passed on. I was sorry to hear it. I had followed his work for so long that it felt like I knew him personally. But I also realised that I had a deep desire to meet him and to challenge some of the things he had said over the years. This wasn’t ever likely to happen. I think I would have fallen into the category of time wasting morons that he would have cancelled a meeting with. But I am grateful for the many laughs he gave me. Humour doesn’t age well and I have a feeling his work won’t stand the test of time. But it was fun while it lasted. He still had some good jokes in him and it’s a shame that his passing will rob us of them.
