Dilbert taught me how to read. Stacked perilously high – between Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side – in my childhood home’s bathroom, Scott Adams’s cartoon provided the perfect reading material for the porcelain throne. Even before I knew what most of the words meant, I’d belly laugh at page after page of banal workplace humor. This is bizarre: why, as a preschooler, was I so tickled by these jokes about human-resources departments and fax machines?

Adams, who died in the night, enjoyed more than a three-decade run as honcho of the funny pages, starting in 1989. For much of this century, his was the biggest cartoon in the world: Dilbert, Dogbert, Alice, the Pointy-Haired Boss, Wally and Catbert appeared in some 2,000 newspapers every day, often at the top of the page. There were yearly calendars and best-selling books, television spin-offs and Dilbert-branded vegetarian burritos. His characters were pasted onto office doors and outside cubicles across the countries like mezuzahs.

It was a nice run, until 2023 when Adams went on a livestream to gab about a Rasmussen poll that said nearly half of black respondents wouldn’t confirm the statement “It’s OK to be white.” Half jokingly, half seriously, he said black people are therefore a hate........

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