Accidental Aesop: The comic in its early days was often remarked upon for having a somewhat anticapitalist, pro-worker streak. However, those themes go against Adams's stated real-life politics, which are strongly pro-capitalist. By Adams's account, many of the early comics were based on stories and jokes he received from fans when asking for comic ideas on the early Internet, suggesting their own attitudes leaking into the comic to a degree.
Is the Pointy-Haired Boss a complete moron? A competent bureaucrat with a sociopathic streak? An initially decent guy made callous by a career dealing with idiot bosses, asshole coworkers and cynical employees? A precautionary tale/example of The Peter Principle?
The strip itself has occasionally been subjected to this. Norman Solomon's book The Trouble With Dilbert, released in 1997, framed the strip (generally viewed as a satire of corporate culture) as inadvertently defending big business by blaming the woes of laborers on lazy coworkers and incompetent middle managers rather than the corporations themselves (though some strips have portrayed the top executives at Dilbert's company as being even more incompetent, lazy, and corrupt than their subordinates.) Other writers like Tom Vanderbilt have taken Adams to task for not suggesting alternatives to the system he portrays, such as unionization or employees otherwise cooperating against unfair management practices, while noting that many corporations eventually embraced Dilbert despite its supposed anti-corporate message. Adams occasionally pushes back against these criticisms: notably, he included several Take Thats at Solomon in both the strip and his book The Joy of Work, where Adams includes a fictional interview with Solomon mocking his arguments as inherently ridiculous.
Archive Panic: The whole archive is online - 30 years of daily strips - That's around 11,000 comic strips. You can find them at 49 strips per page here, with hundreds of pages in total, albeit in an archive format that can make it difficult to search for individual strips. The Reborn strips are harder to find without paying for a subscription to his new website.
One series of strips involved Dilbert's co-worker growing a beard out of his forehead, which caused him to get promoted to manager. When Alice tried to kill him by pushing him down a flight of stairs, he died, but demons infested his corpse and he came back to life. Alice then tried to stab him to death with Dilbert's pen... at which point the whole arc just kind of ended. Even within the (already strange) confines of the strip, this arc is a whole new level of strange.
Alice killed the PHB in a different arc, but to fill the power vacuum she ripped another PHB out of a parallel reality to serve as their PHB. Also classifies as Status Quo Is God.
Asok once died, only to be reincarnated as a Snickers bar. Then used his psychic powers to change into a human.
Dilbert himself once died, only to be cloned from his own trash by Dogbert.
Then there was the time Scott Adams got transported to the strip itself, which led to a parody of The Wizard of Oz.
After Loud Howard's first (and for the longest time, only) appearance in the strip, he was made a supporting character in the cartoon (shouting the obvious works a lot better as a gag in animation) in order to expand the cast. Had Adams not done this it is doubtful the masses would've demanded his return to the strip.
Dogbert: A disturbing number of [the readers] have requested the return of Loud Howard. Loud Howard is neither funny nor insightful. He is simply loud. It's a wonder why anyone would want more of this guy. Loud Howard:THEY LOVE ME!
Catbert, notable for being the only character the fans named, and for becoming part of the recurring cast due to that sheer fan demand.
Fan Nickname: The character Catbert had no name when he first appeared, as just a talking cat with no glasses, but letters poured in asking for more Catbert. Scott Adams later said, "If hundreds of people spontaneously give a character the same name, it's a keeper."
Genius Bonus: The fable that the Pointy-Haired Boss relates in this strip is traditionally used to explain the Scrum software development methodology. If you're not familiar with Scrum, the strip is still very funny, but if you are, it's clear that the PHB thinks himself clever for using an analogy that he read somewhere else and probably doesn't understand.
In this strip the PHB asks for a phone that's larger than an average smartphone but smaller then a average tablet. Dilbert acts like it's a stupid idea. That same year the concept of the phablet started hitting its stride.
While Apple's 2015 watch may not be able to transmit voices and images, it can still be used for email, contacts, web browsing, etc. In other words, Dogbert's idea for a "Dick Tracy watch" seems a bit obsolete.
A 1992 strip has Dogbert saying he'd rather run as a Communist than as a Democrat because he wants to have a chance. This was on the tail end of a generation in which Republican presidents held office for 20 out of 24 years, with those 4 outlier years mainly being due to the Watergate scandal.note Richard Nixon: 1969-1974. Gerald Ford: 1974-1976. Jimmy Carter: 1977-1980. Ronald Reagan: 1981-1988. George H.W. Bush: 1989-1992.The Democratic Presidential candidate won that year.
Adams: This comic made sense in 1992. Trust me.
In his commentary on a hypnotism plotline in the Seven Years of Highly Defective People collection he jokes that you know hypnotism isn't real because all the world leaders aren't hypnotists. In late 2015 he retooled his entire image around the premise that they are.
In 1990, a communist dog asks Dogbert whether "your god is this Donald Trump?". In 2015, it became a meme, and in 2017, Scott Adams published a book about Donald Trump's status as a "Master Persuader" that many have joked has strongly-religious undertones.
Hollywood Homely: Alice; a lot of potshots have been taken at her looks, but due to the simplistic art style she doesn't look that much different from someone considered attractive in-universe.
According to Adams, the term "Bungee Boss" has entered the business lexicon for the situation WhenTheNewBossWantsToChangeEverythingButOopsTooLateHe'sReassignedGoodbye.
Happens rather often. Just read any list of New Century Business Jargon; a lot of it will have come out of Dilbert.
The term "Pointy-Haired Boss", aside from being a Trope Namer, is almost ubiquitous (as is the derivative "pointy-haired" as a synonym for "stupid").
On the Internet, Dilbert has become more well-known for a trilogy of incomprehensible animations made by one "CBoyardee" (who also made Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, and who eventually deleted all of his videos).
Loud Howard has been in exactly three strips to date, one of which was Adams Breaking the Fourth Wall to complain that he didn't understand why people were so interested in a one-joke character. He was popular enough with readers that the Animated Adaptation made him a recurring character. Loud Howard also had a whole bunch more jokes in the animated series, most of which wouldn't work in the strip format.
Techno-Bill has been in two. His inordinate popularity with fans was also noted in the 7th anniversary compilation.
Overshadowed by Controversy: Scott Adams' support of Donald Trump and sympathies with men's rights activists, promotions of COVID-19 hoax-cures, and other dalliances with far-rightism, made the strip unpopular among those who don't share his views; while readers might normally be willing to overlook a cartoonist's personal politics, the fact that said politics resulted in some very public disputes and scandals made them difficult to ignore. This worsened when Adams' new app was accused of exploiting victims of a mass shooting in Gilroy, California, resulting in petitions for Dilbert to be removed from newspapers. Then he wrote (in a blog post, not the strip) that black people were a "hate group" and white people should "stay the hell away from them", and Dilbert was immediately dropped by the syndicator and literally every single newspaper it had been appearing in.
The comic was losing momentum even before its cancellation strip. Way back in 2004 The Comics Curmudgeon had already observed that the comic was struggling to create actual jokes and had settled into a formula of “Bureaucrat rattles off MBA buzzword, Dilbert makes cynical observation, bureaucrat responds with sarcasm or hostility.”
The post cancellation strips have been generally unfunny and excessively focused on the very things that got it cancelled.
Squick: Alice says she was running late for work this morning and had to apply her makeup in the car. Dilbert says he had to shave in the car. Wally says that's nothing; he was so late for work that he had to give himself a sponge bath in the car. And he was driving a car pool at the time, so all his passengers saw it. Eww.
Values Dissonance: One strip around 1997-1998 showed a woman removing male urges from the Pointy-Haired Boss, which then had him thinking "A hair-do and a little make-up", but as of The New '10s when genderfluid, non-binary and transgender issues became more prominent, this comes across as transphobic; it's also a time capsule of its era's attitudes too.
Values Resonance: It's the sort of humor that gets funnier and starts making sense (sometimes a bit too close for comfort) when the reader gets older and enters the workforce; even older strips still feel painfully relevant, proving that mundane and often nonsensical office banality is a long-lasting concept.
Crosses the Line Twice: Alice marries a death-row inmate and immediately stuffs the gag into his mouth herself before he's executed. It's much more horrifying than it sounds.
Harsher in Hindsight: These days someone walking into a government building strapped with dynamite (which they then prepare to light) isn't so funny anymore.
The show's heavy usage of behind the scenes conspiracies for humor can come off as this, given how Adams descended into believing actual conspiracy theories as the 2010s progressed, ultimately playing a role in the comic strip's cancellation.
The scenario of a crotchety old lady who only owns one share of a failing company rambling about irrelevant things at a stockholders' meeting may sound familiar to fans of a certain other show that came much later. The fact that said old lady is voiced by the same person certainly doesn't help.
A one-off gag in the Comp-u-Comp episode had Dogbert explain why a machine uprising was inevitable, but he had a plan to save humanity "in the sense that I save stamps or save old bottles." The Mass Effect trilogy would later have it's Big Bad use the exact same argument, but played 100% straight.
The Blue Duck bears a strong resemblance to the Twitter logo.
The troll in the "Hunger" episode (voiced by Gilbert Gottfried) asks Dilbert "Do I look like Santa Claus to you?" Come 2005, Gottfried voices Santa Claus on Billy & Mandy Save Christmas.
The scene from the merger episode where the process of finding a merging partner is played out like someone looking for a sex partner. Including the part where an executive tells the Pointy-Haired Boss that he wants to merge with him right there in the bar.
The PHB accuses Dilbert of this after the latter saves his life via CPR, in addition to assuming Dilbert tried to Date Rape him.
Memetic Mutation: “I’m posting false information on the web.” “Why?” “It’s fun.” ExplanationA scene in the series has Dogbert doing this exact action while providing that exact reasoning to Dilbert when he asks why. The clip often gets thrown around due to sites such as Twitter spreading false information due to users, often for their amusement.
Baby Wally eating a (literal) mud pie during a flashback in "Elbonian Trip." He also eats mud during their second trip to Elbonia in "Famine", but the Elbonian mud is specifically portrayed as nutritious and edible, so it's not as bad.
Wally pre-"depruning" in "The Prototype."
Lena: 30 HOURS! 30 HOURS IMMERSED IN WATER! Wally: *cheerfully* I can't feel my legs!
When Loud Howard sneezes, hit the floor. Lest ye have your flesh torn and your body stripped right down to the skeleton.
It's subtle, but the way that the credits "flicker" with the sound of the inmate being electrocuted at the end of "The Trial".
Lena and her nasty collection of still-living heads from the men she's decapitated in order to steal their ideas. Not to mention the disturbing cult of personality she creates around herself as part of "Team Lena", which includes denouncing a giant image of Dilbert as "The Enemy", and burning him in effigy like Goldstein from 1984. Wally is part of her team and has become completely brainwashed, referring to his previous life and friends as "the before-time".
The alien merger shown draining human heads.
In "Merger", Loud Howard is locked up in a soundproof glass case, and left to suffocate.
The various Body Horror mutations the office staff succumbs to when the building develops Sick Building Syndrome. Among other things, Wally becomes a giant fly with a human head, and Alice somehow gets a cold that mutates so horrifically she gets MS from it.
Tear Jerker: Dilbert's now-grown Dupey leaving to join the others in exile, even though Dilbert wanted to keep him at home to protect him from mankinds rejection.
Dupey: You have raised me, and I am grateful. But I must be with other Dupeys. Goodbye... *flies away, leaving Dilbert sitting sadly alone in his bedroom*
It's depressing enough that even Dogbert is moved, asking Ratbert to "never leave". Unfortunately, Ratbert ruins the moment by asking of Dogbert meant literally never leaving this room.
Ugly Cute: The Dupeys, even after they've grown up past their cute point.
The Woobie: Dilbert in many cases given how he's often trying to remain somewhat optimistic despite the world he lives in. Not to mention the crap he takes from virtually everyone, including his own mother.
, with hundreds of pages in total, albeit in an archive format that can make it difficult to search for individual strips. The Reborn strips are harder to find without paying for a subscription to his new website.