Dilbert (first published April 16, 1989) is a popular American comic strip. Written and drawn by Scott Adams, the comic is known for its notable amounts of satirical humor about a white-collar, micromanaged office, featuring the engineer Dilbert as the title character. The strip has spawned several books, an animated television series, a computer game, and hundreds of Dilbert-themed merchandise items. Adams has also received the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award and Newspaper Comic Strip Award in 1997 for his work on the strip. Dilbert appears in 2500 newspapers worldwide in 65 countries and 19 languages with over 150 million fans.

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The comic strip originally revolved around the engineer Dilbert and his "pet" dog Dogbert, with most action taking place in their home. Many plots revolved around Dilbert's engineer nature or his bizarre inventions. These alternate with plots based on Dogbert's megalomaniacal ambitions. Later on, the location of most of the action moved to Dilbert's workplace at a large technology company, and the strip started to satirize IT workplace and company issues. The comic strip's popular success is attributable to its workplace setting and themes, which are familiar to a large and appreciative audience.

Dilbert portrays corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy for its own sake and office politics that stand in the way of productivity, where employees' skills and efforts are not rewarded, and busy work praised. Much of the humor emerges as the audience sees the characters making obviously ridiculous decisions that are natural reactions to mismanagement.

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NPR Topics: Arts & Culture

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Katy Perry's I kissed A Girl, the No. 1 hit this summer, is a celebration of teenage sexual experimentation. That's not so strange, but this pop hit features a young woman gleefully mulling same-sex smooching.
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NYT > Arts

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“Dancing,” which more than four million people have viewed on YouTube, is the online equivalent of a platinum hit, seeping from one computer to the next like a virus.
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Arts & Culture

The Theatre
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In March, Chen Qigang, a Chinese composer who is supervising the music program for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics, received a National Spirit Achievers Award at a press event in Beijing. He was one of ten artists and businesspeople to receive the prize, which came courtesy of . . .

Village Voice Arts

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