Diary of a humourist

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For nearly two decades, Scott Adams has been cocking a snook at the vagaries of the corporate world through the immensely-popular comic strip "Dilbert", syndicated in over 2,000 newspapers.

He achieves devastatingly funny results with a minimalist drawing style (a barely perceptible broadening of a circle to indicate a character's eyes widening in astonishment, for instance) and he has created a host of characters and situations that most of us can instantly recognise from our own workplace experiences.

The pointy-haired (and pointy-brained) boss, the perpetually stressed employee who never gets enough appreciation, the co-worker who never works but gets away with it, the wet-behind-the-ears intern. They're all there.

Not all cartoonists can be funny when given only words to work with but Adams is in that league as you can see for yourself by visiting his online writings on The Dilbert Blog (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/). This site is rapidly becoming a cult in blog circles and not just among regular followers of Adams' work.

In fact, the canvas of the blog is wider than that of the strip. While "Dilbert" centres around corporate life, The Dilbert Blog holds forth on just about anything, usually giving it a funny twist. Throughout, Adams uses absurdist humour to make acerbic observations about modern life, like he does in his comic strip.

There's a variety of topics on view here: stem cell research, illegal music downloads, fashion, intelligence Vs happiness, nerdiness, the misuse of technology - and since Adams posts regularly, many more will have been added by the time you read this column.

If you're a fan of Adams' comics, there are plenty of posts related to his work too. He discusses his encounters with the whimsies of cartoon censorship; on one occasion, he was told that his strip couldn't show a policeman firing a gun, so he replaced the gun with a bullet-spraying doughnut, without any explanation to the readers - and his editors happily accepted the new drawing! Adams also holds forth on what works and what doesn't when drawing a strip ("There is something irresistible about a crocodile with a low IQ and a speech defect"), writes about the "six elements of humour" and discusses other strips like Calvin & Hobbes.

One of Adams' great strengths is the ability to pluck something funny out of the most commonplace things - this is a quality he shares with leading American humorists from Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld to columnist Dave Barry (who incidentally has his own blog at http://blogs.herald.com/dave_barrys_blog/). The Dilbert Blog is consistently entertaining, funny and - dare I say it - thought-provoking. Bookmark it or add it to your Bloglines subscriptions now.

Jai Arjun Singh, aka Jabberwock, blogs at
http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com

Bonus
While on funny blogs, don't miss "The Dullest Blog in the World" (http://www.wibsite.com/wiblog/dull/ ), a site that hilariously plays off the common perception of blogs as exercises in navel-gazing.