Scott's sense of humor isn't really laugh-out-loud-funny, but more of a weird tickle deep inside your mind. It's more "eerily amusing" than "funny". I think if you read blog or comics often, it'll grow on you :)

The last line of the blog post "Remember that I'm in the parody business and not the truth business." was the funniest part. Otherwise I got the same amount of boredom from the comic as I did from iPhone-gate.

It guess it just came off as strange to me because it's a stretch in terms of scope. For the comic's history, the jokes have generally implied that Dilbert's unnamed employer produces some kind of sprawling enterprise software, maybe with a consumer version, and to suddenly have them building next-gen smartphones is jarring enough to distract from the gag.

There is something cool about seeing a never-to-be-printed Dilbert strip, though.

I was always under the impression that Dilbert's company was some sort of sprawling conglomerate like G.E. that produces all sorts of products. Dilbert and his coworkers seem to bounce pretty freely between hardware and software products.

Also, I don't think continuity is one of Scott's goals at all. In fact, I suddenly realized how absurd it was to be discussing what is and isn't Dilbert Canon.

There's no Dilbert canon at all. Adams even draws Dilbert's mouth now and then.

i found the punchline to the first one pretty amusing

I thought the first one was better than the second one.

Overall I've found Dilbert to be very hit and miss over time. There are some real gems out there but there's also quite a few which miss the mark.

Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.

> Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.

Definitely the case. This comedy degradation happened to Garfield and Peanuts as well, and it hit Peanuts especially hard because, well, it's Schultz. He was doing genius work in the 1950s-1960s, refining a lot of the medium traits we now take for granted.

Both Garfield and Dilbert were a lot weirder in their early years, had larger casts, and more diverse settings. In one of the early Dilbert plotlines, he discovers dinosaurs hiding in his home after a computer model tells him they can't all be gone. Not exactly genius, but better than anything Adams is making now.

The decline of Peanuts was especially sad. Schultz was a trouper and did the work until he physically and mentally couldn't anymore, and the decline showed painfully. Buying the huge Fantagraphics collection might be beyond your budget, but if you get a chance to flip through it by all means do so.

The foregoing illustrates why The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were ended early. It also illustrates just how resistant to change newspaper readers are: The reason strips are allowed to sit and fester for decades when TV shows are off the air in a few seasons is due entirely to the fact papers will lose circulation if they cut the wrong strip.

I think those were drafts. The Dilbert strips are created using some computer illustration software (Adams even has his own private font that he uses for lettering the strip). So changing the punchlines to something funny wouldn't have taken too much effort.

Apart from coming up with the funny punchline, that is.

I thought the second one was stronger; the punchline of the first was very forced.

I think my chuckling might be disturbing my office mate.