The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh

Rating:
Summary: 1 Star is way too much...
Review: Solomon makes very weak and irrational points in his book. One begins to believe that he just wants to make a profit off of the phenomenon that is Dilbert. I mean, people usually aren't influenced by a cartoon, a cartoon in the comics section of the newspaper. It's not worth the money to buy this book...even if it was free.
I can only imagine the sequel... 'The trouble with Garfield...'. Get a life, Solomon.

Rating:
Summary: Late to the Game
Review: Sorry this review is so late, but I just re-read "The Trouble with Dilbert," and realized that it got an unfair shake from the Amazon reviewers. I never did think that Dilbert was funny, and I really can't understand why it's still on the front page of the Sunday comics in my hometown paper, the Boston Globe. The humor is crude, obvious, stupid, but worst of all, geekishly violent. There is something about nerd threats of violence, something about the Star Trek viewer saying, "do you want me to smash your face in?", that I find nauseating and terrifying. The crux of it is, doesn't Darla or whatever the hell her name is, realize that she couldn't really smash anyone's face in? Don't office geeks understand that a lot of the people they work with would wipe the floor with them? I guess they don't, which is what makes the Dilbert strip such a joke. As Solomon notes, all of the frustration of modern capitalism, all of its meaninglessness and emptiness, expresses itself in workers' loathing of each other. And while there is much hatred of bosses portrayed in Dilbert, there is no political element to it. The comic strip simply allows reader-employees to engage in low, chuckling fantasies of violence perpetrated on their bosses, without any intimation that there might be another way to channel that rage.

I guess my problem with Dilbert, which Solomon captures beautifully, is that its subject is ripe for true satire. Office life screams for subversive parody, a la the movie "Office Space." But what we get with Dilbert is not satire, but awkward, junior high school fantasies of violecne, fantasies with no connection to social or physical reality. When I read Dilbert, the first image that springs to mind is Columbine, which is no comic matter.

Rating:
Summary: The Jealousy Of Norman Solomon
Review: Tsk, tsk, tsk. In this reader's opinion Norman Solomon's jealousy of Scott Adams' success is showing. He takes comments made by Adams out of context. He is just riding the Dilbert creator's 'coat tails'.