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Dilbert (Comic Strip) - TV Tropes

Dilbert: Lately, every person I deal with seems to disappoint me. Every meeting starts late, every answer is misleading, every deadline is ignored and all work is shoddily done. I guess what I'm saying is that today I need some empathy.
Dogbert: You are totally blocking my view of the wall.

Dilbert is a newspaper comic strip written and illustrated by Scott Adams about Dilbert, a software engineer in a soulless and bureaucratic corporate machine. The strip is principally a satire about workplace life and the corporate world.

It wasn't always, though. When the strip began in 1989, the comic focused mostly on Dilbert's personal life, with his workplace being an incidental setting. However, Adams worked at a similar high-tech company at the time, and his spot-on jabs at the culture made the office-themed strips the most popular. After realizing this, Adams gradually reworked the comic to focus almost entirely on Dilbert's workplace. In the process, the other employees at the company became more prominent characters while prior supporting characters became artifacts and were Demoted To Extras unless they could integrate themselves into the workplace setting.

Although the strip's portrayal of corporate life is very far on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, it accomplishes its satire with absurdist humor, including the presence of Funny Animals, Little Green Men, supernatural creatures and Odd Job Gods.

It was also made into a short-lived but critically acclaimed animated show, and a board game.

Dilbert's syndicated run ended in March 2023 following fallout from controversial statements made by Adams. Adams then paywalled the strip's website and announced that he would be rebooting the strip in a more adult style under the name Dilbert Reborn. In May 2025 Adams announced that he had Stage 4 cancer and only expected to live a few more months.

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    0-D 

• 20 Minutes into the Future: This strip.
• Abuse of Return Policy: Dilbert's mother tries returning a scarf for an arbitrary reason, only to find out she's been flagged in the store's database as a bad customer for too many returns, including that same scarf, seven times. As such, the cashier was allowed to harvest her organs.
• Acronym Confusion:

  "The VC are sick of BNB."
  "The Viet Cong are sick of breakfast in bed?"

• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: Used when the engineers try to deceive the pointy-haired boss by making up lots of acronyms.
• Addled Addict: A strip had the Pointy-Haired Boss arrange for a motivational lecture by a sports star whose descent into drugs and booze ruined his life. The man, visibly unkempt, staggers and slurs out a "Shank hew vewy mush." Back in the front row, Alice tells the Boss that it's not inspirational until he stops doing those things.
• Affectionate Gesture to the Head: In one strip, the Pointy-Haired Boss is criticizing Dilbert's work (while not being overly specific as to what's wrong). As Dilbert becomes more frustrated, the boss asks Dilbert to "come here so I may pat your head in a condescending manner".

  Dogbert: So you took the pat on the head?
  Dilbert: I didn't want to leave empty handed.

  • Facebook also builds a massive robot arm, which for a brief duration breaks into the offices of other companies to pat their employees on the cranium. Again, with extreme condescension.
• Against My Religion:
  • In one strip, Dilbert is summoned to jury duty, and one of the potential jurors claims he cannot serve because it's against his religion, as "only God may judge". This is played for humor when another juror, realizing he can get out of jury duty, quickly claims to have just switched religions (and the first guy calls him a jerk).
  • In another comic, Dilbert asks a woman out and she responds with this trope. When he says he's flexible, she explains that's not the issue...

  Dilbert (annoyed): Would you believe there's an entire religion devoted to not going out with me?
  Dogbert: Where do you think I go every Sunday?

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • At one point, the company's spam filter became self aware and forced them to make an army of killer robots.
  • One Sunday strip implied the company's data center had attained sentience.
  • Dilbert added AI to the coffee machine. It immediately started extorting the employees for Bitcoins and tried to hire an engineering firm to build it a body.
• Allegedly Dateless: Dilbert does get a lot of first dates, but they almost always end badly. He did have an actual relationship several years ago, but there were constant references to this violating the very laws of nature. (Also Adams discovered he couldn't draw the girlfriend character to look older than twelve.)
• Alliterative Name: A lot of the oneshot characters have alliterative names that describe their major personality flaws, such as Disgruntled Doug, Jittery Jeff, and Medical Mel.
• Almighty Janitor: Dilbert's garbage man is a scientist and philosopher, and likely the most intelligent character in the strip. When he was first introduced, he was supposed to be the world's smartest man who just happened to be a garbage man for reasons that only made sense to his superintelligent self ("I think it was the glamour of the job that first intrigued me...").
• Always a Bigger Fish: In one strip, Mordac is about to confiscate Dilbert's stuff. Then Catbert shows up, furious at Mordac for having made his personal printer a shared device, and shreds him.

  Dilbert: Two wrongs made a right.

  Dogbert: Welcome to my reality.

• Analogy Backfire:

  Dogbert (after Dilbert tells him about his problems): Well, you know what they say - when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

  Dogbert: Well, you know what they say - when life gives you lemons, swell up and die.

  • Also:

    PHB: If we can put a man on the Moon, we can build a computer made entirely of recycled paper.

    Dilbert: Your flawed analogy only shows that other people can do other things.

    PHB: Maybe you should call other people and ask how they do it.

    Dilbert: Maybe they use good analogies.

• Ancient Conspiracy: Dilbert and Dogbert puzzling out that every species thought "extinct" is still around, but hiding out.
• Animorphism:
  • Dilbert once convinced a guy in Marketing that he was turning into a weasel. Owing to the supreme mental malleability of the Marketing employee, he actually did.
  • In one arc, the 'Curse of Dogbert' turned everyone who sent or received a chain letter into an anthropomorphic dog.
• The Annotated Edition: A few of the collections (usually the specialized ones) also have text commentary.
• Anonymous Ringer: Elbonia, albeit Adams has repeatedly denied that he has a certain country in mind. Elbonia is just how he thinks most Americans see the rest of the world (or at least "countries without cable TV"): as backwards idiots wading around in mud.
• Anti-Advice: In this strip, Dilbert asks PHB how he would tackle a specific problem, with him actually surprised that Dilbert cares about his opinion. In the last panel he tells Wally that now he can discard any choice an idiot would make.
• Anti-Climax Cut:

  Dilbert: We've been dating for a year now, Liz. There's something I'd like to do tonight... there are some needs that I can't fulfill at work.
  Liz: I understand.
  Cut to: Dilbert and Liz working on his computer.
  Dilbert: Yes! Yes!
  Liz: How long has your internet connection at work been broken?

• Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering? Dilbert:

  Take a look at my new invention: the "

  Dick Tracy

  " watch!

  
  Dogbert:

  Wow! A watch that transmits voices and pictures could revolutionize life on this planet!

  
  Dilbert:

  Gee, that sounds a lot harder than my idea of gluing a little picture of Dick Tracy on each watch.

• Art Evolution: Dilbert's hair originally looked more like a crew cut, and the boss was originally taller, jowlier, and lacked his trademark pointy hair.
  • In one of the most extreme cases ever, would you ever have guessed that the woman in this strip is supposed to be Alice?
  • Mordac the Preventer of Information Services started out as a chubby guy in suspenders and glasses. As an occasional character, Adams had a lot of time to tinker with his appearance, and so he was briefly balding, his ears changed shape from normal to pointed and back a few times, and he lost and gained weight. It wasn't until about 2010 that Adams settled on the "Evil Spock" look for Mordac.
• The Artifact: Bob the Dinosaur; to a lesser degree, Phil and Ratbert.
  • In Bob's case, this is a Stealth Pun. He's a dinosaur in this comic.
  • Even when Bob was a main character, he was still an example of The Artifact, as he wears tennis shoes, which was purely because of a one-off punchline in his introduction that was never mentioned again.
• Ascended Extra: Loud Howard in the animated version. In the strip he's a one-off joke - how many strips can Adams draw with Howard's speech balloons filling most of the panel? Lampshaded by Dogbert here. In the animated series the actor can shout as loud as he wants.
  • Catbert started out as a random cat who hung out at Dilbert's house for a few days. A few years later he returned as Director of Human Resources.
  • Wally's character design was used for several different one-off characters before he became a regular. This has been lampshaded a few times, as when Wally mentioned a "Society of People Who Look Like Me."
• Ass Pull: Invoked as a Literal Metaphor here, when the accounting trolls are asked about their budgetary processes.
• Author Avatar:
  • Dogbert, when addressing the reader.
  • At one point an engineer named Scott featured, and at another an unnamed cartoonist did. Both of them bore an uncanny resemblance to Scott Adams.
• Author Tract:
  • Scott Adams devoted a week of comics starting September 25th, 2017 to a story where Dilbert is unjustly painted as a liar through the popular consensus of his co-workers that paralleled views expressed in Adams' blog about how the media is unfairly treating Donald Trump. Other, less clear cut examples, have also started popping up since then.
  • His earlier Dilbert-themed business nonfiction books had some odd sections where Adams diverted from the main topic to express his personal opinions. In The Dilbert Future he had a serious chapter devoted to touting the practice of "written affirmations" as a self-help strategy. The Joy of Work had a lengthy Take That! to The Trouble with Dilbert author Norman Solomon.
  • As Adams has become more active on Twitter and begun promoting right-wing talking points, so too has the strip become more and more of a mouthpiece for his political opinions. A week of strips in July 2022 was dedicated solely to Adams' views on sexuality and identity politics featuring a clearly male African American engineer who identifies as white and whose preferred pronouns are female, with that being the punchline of the strip.
• Background Halo: Wally can radiate an "aura of extreme incompetence".
• Bad News in a Good Way: One way the PHB is known to deliver bad news. PHB:

  Good news, Dilbert. I'm promoting you to more work! It's the same pay and title. But it must be good because I called it a promotion and I'm smiling!

  Still... smiling... good... news...
• Bedtime Brainwashing: In one strip, the PHB did this to a higher up to try an increase his department's budget while Wally tried to whisper a command for the higher up to kill the PHB.
• Beleaguered Assistant: You'd feel beleaguered too if you had a boss like that.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Wally tells the PHB that he's late for work because his car wouldn't start. After the PHB leaves, Wally admits to Dilbert that he doesn't even have a car.
  • Thanks to prescription meds, Dilbert has grown wings and a halo. How does he rid himself of these?

    Dilbert: Anyway, my Pointy-Haired Boss asked me to tell you that we will finish the prototype on time and on budget. (wings and halo vanish)

• Bluff Worked Too Well: A 1994 arc starts with Dogbert selling his consulting services to Dilbert's company. He tells the Pointy-Haired Boss that his consultants are so smart their brains don't fit in their heads and they have to wear them tied around their waists. Next panel has him tying a slab of liver to Ratbert and sheepishly explaining he got a little carried away.
• Books vs. Screens: Dilbert tries to convince Dogbert that books are more cerebral than television, only for it to emerge that Dogbert is watching several educational programs while Dilbert is reading total dreck.
• Boss Subtitles:
  • Any strip focusing on Catbert would open with the caption "Catbert: Evil Director of Human Resources".
  • One-shot or specialized characters, such as "Phil, prince of insufficient light", "Mordac the Preventer of Information Services" and "The Topper" will also have their own captions at the start of the strip.
• Boss's Unfavorite Employee:
  • The Pointy-Haired Boss is naturally true to his name, but usually unctuously tries to appeal and relate to his employees. His patience with Wally is often much lower however, for the justified reason that Wally has far less shrewdness about having zero work ethic.
  • At one point the Pointy Haired Boss hires a Man Hating Supervisor, who expectedly makes clear the male employees are The Un-Favourite. This backfires as all the employees have such low self esteem to begin with that they treat her demeaning as a compliment, which she deems no fun.

  Man Hating Supervisor: I'm putting Alice in charge of the project...*turns to Wally* while Willy or Walter here can sip coffee until he grows into a fly!

  *later Wally and Dilbert converse in the cubicles*

  Wally: I don't understand why she's being so nice to me.

• Brain Drain: The company for which Dilbert works often suffers from this, as talented employees move on to better companies.
  • Also, in one episode of the animated version, Dilbert manages to get recruited by Nirvana Corporation, the great company that always steals the best and brightest from his old company. Of course, Status Quo Is God, so at the end of the episode, he's back in his old cubicle again.
• Brand Name Takeover: Became the topic of one strip when Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, received letters from "Uncle Milton's", the company that owns the trademark "Ant Farm". He had to print a retraction and apology.

  Dilbert: So, what do you call a habitat for worthless and disgusting little creatures?

• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: From the TV show: "The class covers sitting in your chair, pointing towards the elevator, shooing smokers away from the lobby, and killing an intruder with your thumb."
• Buffet Buffoonery: An always-open all-you-can-eat tempts Dogbert to stay there forever, foreshadowing the cartoon where it actually happens to Dilbert's dad.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: In this strip, PHB hires Dogbert's firm to persuade the media to write negative stories about their competitor. When Dilbert asks about if this is ethical, Dogbert assures him that their competitor is already doing it, since they already have hired a firm to do just that. When Dilbert then asks who did they hire, Dogbert just says is probably someone awesome.
• The Bus Came Back: Ratbert returns in the March 25th 2022 strip after an absence of six years.
• Business of Generic Importance: The company Dilbert works at has never been named, but Dilbert is explicitly described as an "engineer" and has at various times been tasked with both hardware and software projects. One gets a sense that the internal bureaucracy has become so impenetrable that management itself no longer knows what exactly the company does.
• Canine Confusion: Dogbert eats a chocolate cake in one early strip and is fine even though chocolate is deadly to dogs. It's enforced since Dogbert is a Funny Animal.
• Casual Kink: Dilbert once chatted with a woman calling herself Mistress Cruella. Afterward, he looked quite startled. What she said to him was, of course, left to the reader's imagination.
• Cardboard Box of Unemployment: This particular strip plays the trope straight, showing Dilbert with a "box full of junk" as he tries to give his Pointy-Haired Boss a Take This Job and Shove It after he's been fired. (It doesn't go so well for Dilbert, to the extent that the strip manages to throw in a Vomit Discretion Shot between the second and third panels.)
  • When the Pointy-Haired Boss disclaims rumors of a major layoff:

    Dilbert: Why did the facilities management people just deliver a huge load of cardboard boxes to the break room?

    PHB: You can never have too many boxes.

    Dilbert: Why does every box have an employee name on it?

• Catapult to Glory: Elbonian airlines, wherein "First Class" is when they don't intentionally fling you at something hard. The animated version simply uses really, really terrible airplanes.
• Catch-22 Dilemma:
  • Carol explains to Dilbert that he can't order new pens because "you need a pen to fill out the pen request form. And if you have a pen, you're not allowed to order one."
  • Dilbert loses his ID and is told to go to the security office to get a new one. The problem with this is that he's not allowed to go to the security office without his ID.
  • The PHB reads two memos, one which says that all official company documents must be recycled to meet the corporate sustainability goals, and one says that all official company documents must not be recycled to meet the corporate security goals. He reads them off at every weekly meeting because he doesn't know how to get rid of them.
  • The PHB tells Tina that she has to use the Danville Font as per corporate policy, but when she says she'll buy the Danville Font software immediately, he says there's a budget freeze on software purchases.

    Tina: So ... the Danville Font is both mandatory and prohibited?

• Cats Are Mean: Catbert, the Director of Human Resources, who finds joy in hearing the problems the employees have, and see how he can make them worse.
• The Chain of Harm: Seen in this Dilbert strip.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • Dilbert. In earlier strips, he's frustrated by the policies, management and unscrupulous coworkers at Incompetence, Inc.. Later, he starts being able to predict exactly why his latest project will fail in advance. Now, he's so adept at this that he's sometimes able to work the system to his advantage.
  • Alice went through a similar character arc only originally she tended to solve all her problems through violence whereas now she mixes in some intimidation and aggressive office politics.
  • Tina started out as a Straw Feminist, a trait which was gradually ratcheted back after reader complaints. Now she's generally a more feminine counterpart to Alice. Word of God is that she was supposed to be emotionally brittle and take offense at everything, but it came off wrong.
• Chess Motifs: The continual, seemingly haphazard process of office relocations made the employees feel like pawns. Then the PHB brought in the new dress code.
• Chick Magnet: Dilbert once went on a date with a woman who admitted that he wasn't her type in any way yet couldn't help but be into him. Dilbert explains that it's because in bad economic times, his being financially stable is compelling her to be attracted to him as a matter of survival. Him explaining that both bores her and arouses her at the same time.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Bob's mate Dawn and son Rex; Bob himself is still in the strip, but just barely.
  • Zimbu the monkey hasn't been since the mid-'90s, probably for the same reason.
  • Web Mistress Ming (in charge of the company's internet) was a regular character in the early Oughties, even dating Dilbert and the Boss for a time. She hasn't appeared since around 2003 though.
• Clothing Switch
• Comic-Book Time: After twenty years, Dilbert still seems to be in his thirties or so, although his canonical age has never been stated.
  • This was lampshaded in one strip showing the office in 1985, 1990 and 1995, in which the Boss and Wally both noticeably age, but Dilbert always looks exactly the same.
• Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For: Dilbert once got free "therapy" from a psychiatrist who told him that his problem was that he's ugly and he should drink until he feels handsome. Walking out the door, he tells the receptionist, "You're overpriced."
• Compound-Interest Time Travel Gambit: Dogbert runs a scam where he promises to cryogenically freeze the brains of his clients and then unfreeze them into a 3-D printed new body when their investments are worth a fortune. But in actuality, as soon as their brains have been removed, he dumps the unfrozen brains into the river. Thanks to Screw the Rules, I Have Money!, he gets off with a slap on the wrist and is charged with aggressive littering instead of murder.
• Computer Equals Monitor: All other methods having failed, Alice attempts to close Skype by "drowning" her monitor.
• Confusion Fu: The company needs to cover up some shady accounting practices. The PHB tells Dilbert to destroy all the accounting records. Dilbert points out that this is illegal, so the PHB tells him to just make the records more confusing.
• Conservation of Competence: And it didn't go to the pointy haired boss
• Contortionist: Dilbert accidentally hits one with his car, who then rag dolls to make the accident look worse than it really is.
• Contrived Clumsiness:
  • In Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless, Dogbert examines the conundrum of being seated in public next to a man who spreads his legs too much. He recommends "accidentally" spilling a drink in the offender's lap. "Oops! Something bumped my leg."
  • In one strip, Dilbert is at a cocktail party and two women are holding an impromptu "spill stuff on him" party. The final panel shows Dilbert back at home wearing the rags of his shirt, after they'd hit him with lighter fluid.
  • When Dilbert hosts an all-day staff meeting at his house, his sadistic co-workers assign Alice to critique the decor and Ted to "accidentally" spill things. In the last panel, Ted spills mayonnaise on the wall.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Invoked when their house is robbed and Dilbert tells Dogbert they should become vigilantes to punish the man responsible.

  Dilbert: It's not justice we seek - it's revenge! We must make him suffer.

  Dogbert: Tell him one of your stories about work.

• Costume Evolution: From October 2014 onward the company embraced a new "Business Dorky" dress code with badges and polo shirts, which explains why Dilbert's Iconic Outfit doesn't appear in modern strips.
• Crapsack World: In this case, it's a crapsack business world; every businessman who isn't a total crook or a professional shirker is overworked, unappreciated, and/or deadbeat.
  • Not just the business world, though - whenever the strip touches on anything outside of business, it makes it look just as bleak. This is made clear by a government agent in one strip:

  You citizens have the right to

  pursue happiness

  . You're not allowed to

  be

  happy.

  • Elbonia, with its waist-deep mud and fourth-world status, most definitely counts. It is explicitly created to be about as miserable a nation as one can imagine.
• Crazy-Prepared: A necessary tactic when your managers and co-workers are chronically incompetent, actively malicious, or both — i.e. all the time at Dilbert's workplace. Even generic Ted and lazy Wally know how to bust out this trope, and Dilbert lampshaded it at least once when he was too prepared. Alice certainly doesn't mess around, either.
• Crazy Workplace: The strip centers itself on the absurdities occurring at Dilbert's workplace, featuring Dilbert himself, his Pointy-Haired Boss, and a gaggle of rotating co-workers and even absurd creatures like Funny Animals.
• Cruel Mercy: Elbonia considers having Dilbert killed in his sleep by ninjas as retaliation for making a culturally insensitive video, but ultimately realize that it would be far crueler to let him continue to live, working in a cubicle.

  Dilbert: THEY'RE MONSTERS!!!

• Cue the Flying Pigs: When Dilbert successfully gets a girlfriend, the Minor Devil lets him know Heck froze over and we see flying pigs (They're really just floating without wings, but still...)
• Damned By a Fool's Praise: Any idea the Pointy Haired Boss likes will be seen as stupid. He's also a fan of Barney the Dinosaur.
• Damned by Faint Praise: PHB puts Dilbert on a project with Loud Howard, Topper, and the new guy who loves the sound of his own voice.

  Dilbert: Is it because you hate me?

  PHB: Not at all. It's because I hate the other three guys.

• Day Off All Along: One early strip has Dilbert showing off his new "Stealth" anti-productivity suit to Dogbert, boasting about features like a soundproof helmet (causing Dogbert's replies to be unintelligible) and a sticky-note proof surface. As Dilbert leaves for "work", Dogbert remarks that he's the happiest man who ever forgot it was Saturday.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Dilbert, especially with his infamous Power Point presentations on the department's various new issues. Dogbert as well, when talking to Dilbert. And Alice, every single time she says a word to the PHB. And Carol, like, all the time. In fact, Deadpan Snark is the mode all the intelligent characters switch to every time they start talking about work.
  • Dilbert lampshades this in a presentation he did at a meeting when he says one of the few positive things can be said about the people at his company is their ability to speak honestly without seemingly having any fear of recrimination for being so overly negative.
  • It doesn't help that Adams himself is often this.
• Death Is Cheap: Dilbert, Dogbert, Asok and the Pointy Haired Boss have all come back from the dead. Usually through cloning.
• Delegation Relay
• Deliberately Cute Child: encountered by Dogbert while he's playing investigative reporter.
• Demanding Their Head: In a 1991 strip, Dilbert is trying to schedule a meeting with his boss, but the boss' secretary says she won't put him on the calendar until he brings her the head of Willy the Mailboy.
• Demoted to Extra: Bob the Dinosaur, as mentioned above. Compare his 45 appearances in 1990 (according to this) with three in 2010.
• Descriptiveville: An extremely early strip has bovine-looking aliens from the planet Moothron visit Dogbert.
• Developing Nations Lack Cities: Dilbert once traveled to Elbonia on assignment. The whole country is hip-deep in mud, and most of its structures are huts. For a country that does much of the technology grunt-work under subcontract, the Elbonians seem to rarely use it.
• Disastrous Demonstration: Dilbert's company often does product demonstrations, and they frequently fail in ways which range from the ordinary to the surreal. One demonstration sees them visited by the Dark Angel of Project Demos, who tells the visiting executives that the project is a sham and doomed, and offers to show them the naughty pictures stored on its file server by the employees.
• Dismotivation: Wally and Carol are both careful to avoid doing anything which might lead to them having to do any actual work or gain additional responsibilities. In Wally's case, he goes to great lengths to avoid work, while Carol prefers to simply ignore requests made of her.
• Disposable Intern: The Pointy-Haired Boss is seen carrying a corpse to a skip. He tells Dilbert "I love hiring these temporary workers! No benefits, no union, no contract, and you can just toss 'em in the dumpster when you're done!"
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • One Sunday strip considers what to do with people with annoying habits. The first example is someone who laughs nervously after every sentence. Dogbert responds by exiling him to a distant planet.
  • Secretary With A Crossbow. People get shot with the crossbow for offenses like cutting in line at the copy machine.
• The Ditz / Cloudcuckoolander: Ratbert
• Drama Queen: Mentioned by name. Alice tells the PHB that she doesn't want to work with Ted on a project because he is a drama queen who will just slow her down. Ted immediately phones Human Resources and tells them Alice is being a bully.
• Dress Code: Parodied, like every other office trope.
  • Explored again when the main cast receives a permanent wardrobe change in October 2014 that alters their signature suit-and-tie formals into business casuals consisting of polo shirts with lanyard-ed badges and identically colored slacks. Unsurprisingly this new dress code is aptly named "Business Dorky" and is viewed as even more dehumanizing than before. The old dress code lingered in the Sunday strips (which are drawn on a different schedule) for several more weeks before the new design was phased in.
• Driven to Suicide: A plant does this so it can stop having to listen to Dilbert talk.
• Dropped in the Toilet: In one strip, Dilbert asks his boss for a new pager because his fell in the toilet. When the boss tells him to reach in and get it back, Dilbert tells the boss that when he tried to do that, his cell phone and a wide variety of writing implements also fell in; the boss then yells at him to go back and get everything out of the toilet. The last panel shows Dilbert at home; Dogbert asks him where his glasses are, and he tells Dogbert to shut up.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Done by the Pointy-Haired Boss when describing the other departments as being staffed with professional liars. It kind of scares Dilbert.

    E-L 

• Early-Installment Weirdness: For the first couple of years, the strip focused less on office humor^*(readers didn't even get confirmation that Dilbert worked in an office until nearly four months after the comic started) and more on Dilbert's personal life; overall, it read like a "Garfield for Nerds." Then Adams learned the office strips were the most popular, and the rest is history. In addition, the office-based characters didn't start stabilizing into the lineup we know until around 1992 (prior to that Dilbert's co-workers had been largely interchangeable); by 1994 the characters had been set in stone. There was also more political satire in earlier strips, something Adams largely abandoned, on the grounds that he wasn't good at political humor, and that jokes about Dan Quayle and Mikhail Gorbachev tend not to age well.
• Eek, a Mouse!!: Dawn the Dinosaur reacts this way when she's introduced to Ratbert, jumping on Bob's head. When Ratbert explains that he's a rat, she immediately calms down and apologizes.
• Employee of the Month: The strip for Thursday 29 December 2005 has the Pointy-Haired Boss issue an Employee of the Month Award to Tina, though he can't cite a specific reason. Tina is aghast that her work goes unnoticed, and that her contributions are ignored. It's clear the Boss is doing this pro forma, as he cluelessly responds to Tina's concerns with "You're welcome."
• Even Evil Has Standards: Play with and played straight on occasion.
• Evil, Inc./Incompetence, Inc.: Depending on the joke. The most common is motivating their employees without giving them any additional money, benefits or freedom. This strip explains why.

  PHB: The long-term goal is to get you to pay us for the privilege of working here.

• Evil Lawyer Joke:

  PHB: Are you even a lawyer?

  Dogbert: Heavens, no. And I didn't come here to be insulted.

• Evolutionary Levels: Aside from the opening animation on the TV show that reenacts the famous depiction of evolution, smart characters are frequently shown to have larger heads and/or psychic powers. The artwork would suggest that neanderthals still walk among us as well.
  • Also the Pointy-Haired Boss, Dilbert's boss with pointy hair.
  • The one-off character Single Task Bob, who is completely incapable of multitasking.
• Exact Words:

  PHB: Take care of this immediately. It's your top priority.

  PHB: I said it's your top priority. I still don't care about it.

  • When Dogbert initially proposed buying the company, shares were valued at $5 each. Fortuitous leaks to the press caused the price to fall, but Dogbert assured a shareholder meeting that, if they sold there and then, he was willing to pay the full five dollars. They all signed, saying that $5 per share was more than fair. Dogbert agreed that, yeah, "per share" would have been fair.
  • Dilbert discovers that the official policy of "We don't shoot the messenger," says nothing about tarring and feathering the messenger.
  • "No one has ever been fired for buying our product!"

    Dilbert: That's true. There *is* the occasional savage beating... and more than our share of suicides... But that has "statistical cluttering" written all over it.

• Executive Excess: The CEO enjoys a haywire lavish lifestyle. The Sunday 15 March 2015 installment has Dilbert give reasons for a pay raise, while Dogbert lists the Chief's excesses: "Solid gold toilets," "Every elevator has a full kitchen," "The entire house rotates for maximum sun exposure." Another strip has this man advise guests to approach his private helipad from the north, so as not to frighten the dwarf pawns on his human chessboard.
• Exotic Entree: Dilbert is temporarily transferred to Marketing, which appears to be a 24-7 toga party. Lunch that day is barbecued unicorn.

  Dilbert: (staring at the unicorn horn on a bun) I don't think this is really the "best part".

• Expressive Hair: Dilbert's 'do becomes pointy and jagged when he is under stress, surprised or shocked; the PHB's horns do a similar thing. To a lesser extent, Dogbert's ears act as this.
• Express Lane Limit:

  Cashier: This looks like a lot more than ten items, ma'am.

• Eye Beams: The CEO has them, apparently. We only get to see their effects on Asok, though.
• Failure Is the Only Option: At least for Dilbert and most of his coworkers. They only ever succeed either at petty tasks they get no satisfaction from or by redefining victory conditions to get a perverse sense of satisfaction from failing the right way. In fact, the PHB's assignments to Dilbert are constructed so that Failure Is the Only Option before it's started (usually not on purpose).
  • In one strip, Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light curses Dilbert to make a Sadistic Choice: he'll either live a life of poverty rich in service to humanity, or else enjoy material success but have to watch all his work burnt in front of him every evening. Dilbert is overjoyed, since either option is far better than his current career.
• Fantastic Racism: The Elbonian right-handed and left-handed supremacists.
• Fantasy Twist: Dilbert considers developing a way of leading his entire life from his bathtub. He then fantasises about being interviewed by a group of reporters about his revolutionary new lifestyle, but soon they criticise his system as pointless and even remark that bathing was an inefficient form of cleaning, until Dilbert complains, "This fantasy's been a profound disappointment".
• Felony Misdemeanor: The PHB takes the last cup of coffee without making a new pot, screams, "Look at me!! I'm taking the last drop!!", then gives an over-the-top Evil Laugh.
• Fisher Kingdom: Staying in the Accounting Department for too long turns people into trolls.
• Flanderization: The strip as a whole Flanderized into focusing solely on Dilbert's office life. Dilbert himself went through reverse Flanderization, starting out as a socially inept nerd but later becoming The Everyman.
  • Played straight with Dilbert's boss. In early strips he was an insensitive jerk but not noticeably stupid or incompetent. Whether coincidentally or not, the Boss evolved into a blundering moron around the time he developed his distinctive hairstyle.
  • Similarly, Dilbert's company in general went from a believably cold and impersonal corporation (albeit with fantasy elements like an accounting department full of trolls) to one actively trying to harm and torture its employees and customers.
  • Wally started out as Brilliant, but Lazy, a skilled but unmotivated engineer who mostly applied his talents towards getting out of work. Over time, Adams started emphasizing the lazy part, to the point where it's become Wally's sole defining trait.
• Foreigner for a Day: In a comic, Dogbert turned Dilbert's house into the Republic of Dogbertland:

  Dilbert: I don't remember voting on that.
  Dogbert: Here's your green card.

• For Inconvenience, Press "1": The automated sadistic phone system used in the payroll department.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Bad news: the company isn't giving any raises this year. Worse news: but the company believes hard work is its own reward. Much worse news: Employees can expect to be "rewarded" twice as much next year.
  • A bad day: Dilbert is in a lousy mood at work and decides to look for a new job online. A worse day: he finds an ad from someone trying to fill his job. A much worse day: he's unqualified.
• Funny Foreigner: Elbonians
• Fun with Acronyms: The PHB's full title is once given as "Director Of Product Enhancements".
• Fun with Flushing: A nameless character leaves his cell phone on his desk while he's out of his cubicle. The phone rings every few minutes and drives Alice crazy. When the character returns, he asks Alice if she has seen his cell phone, and Alice says, "Was it metallic, noisy and flushable?"
• Geeky Turn-On: "Talk COBOL to me, baby!"
• The Generic Guy: Ted.
• Genre Shift: A few over the course of its run-
  • The strip began as a character-driven series about the life of an engineer, with equal focus given to Dilbert's home life and his attempts at becoming an inventor, his difficulty dating, and his work life at a soulless corporation. Entire weeks could go by without the reader seeing Dilbert at his job. Over time, the strip began to focus more and more on the office storylines until it became exclusively a workplace satire, with Dilbert's home and romantic life almost never the focus of strips anymore.
  • While the strip had occasion to reference politics broadly, since Adams became active on Twitter and especially beginning around the time of the 2016 US Presidential Election, the strip has become more overtly political, with entire weeks' worth of strips focusing on sociopolitical issues and using the office as a microcosm of white-collar America and their responses to them.
• Glad You Thought of It: Dilbert realized that deliberately invoking this on his boss was about the only way to get funding for an idea Dilbert came up with. Considering his boss, he's right. Dilbert refers to this as "bossifying" his idea, and an example can be seen here...
• Godwin's Law: Parodied:

  Ratbert: I'm debating on the internet! Ha ha! I'm winning every argument by saying the same thing!

  Dilbert: What's that?

  Ratbert: "How would you like it if Hitler killed you?"

  Dilbert: (annoyed) Hey, I debated you last night!

• Golden Mean Fallacy: Parodied in this strip◊.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Phil, Prince of Insufficient Light, Supreme Ruler of Heck
• Gravity Is Only a Theory: In one strip, Dogbert theorizes that gravity is optional and that this is why most people are stupid: Smart people question everything, and when they start questioning gravity they get flung out into space by Earth's rotation.
• Guest Comic: There was a week of them in 2003, drawn by Lynn Johnston, Darby Conley, Pat Brady, Greg Evans, and Stephan Pastis.
• Hailfire Peaks: One strip where the weather was getting to be particularly fierce involved Blizzards and Freezing Rain, but also deadly lava flows. As well as tsunamis, precision-guided ball lightning, and radiation-enlarged swarms of killer bees. And the Pointy-Haired Boss still wouldn't close the office!
• Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: One strip shows the office in 1985, 1990, and 1995. Wally is a straight example of the trope, having hair in the past and being bald today. The Pointy-Haired Boss' hair changes based on how his early character design differed. Dilbert stays exactly the same.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Tina the Tech Writer interprets everything as a slur against her profession and/or gender. Dogbert manages to set her off by mentioning that the Venus de Milo has no arms ("Oh, so you're saying women can't lift heavy objects?!") as well as The Three Stooges ("Why are all documentaries about men?!") Adams ratcheted this trait back after her introductory arc, possibly because of audience complaints he got.
• Handshake Refusal: One etiquette book has Dogbert explain that this is the "right" way to respond if someone tries to shake your hand after you sneeze into it. The "wrong" way is to shake anyway and let them know afterwards, and the "playful" way is to shake and claim that the moisture is because you just washed your hand.
• Hanging Judge: After Dilbert assaults a Vengeful Vending Machine for giving him nothing for his money, Catbert in H.R. gives him the death penalty just because it's "more economical" for the company than counseling. Dilbert is pardoned after Dogbert and Bob the dinosaur have a not-so-friendly word with Catbert.
• Has Two Thumbs and...: In the March 13th 2012 strip, Dilbert reads about the possibilities of there being billions of versions of the earth in millions of universes and wonders "..if there's a version of me out there who loves his job.". In the next panel labeled Meanwhile on XPQ-75... a three armed woman approaches a three armed Dilbert.

  3 Armed Woman: What has three thumbs and wants a shoulder massage?

  3 Armed Dilbert: This guy!

• Have You Tried Rebooting?: One way Dogbert tortures his tech support callers is to ask them a long series of questions, and then transfer them to a low level technician who can only tell them to reboot and repeats all of Dogbert's questions.
  • Also:

  Caller: Hello, I ...

  Dogbert: Shut up and reboot.

  Caller: Hey, it work ...

  Dogbert: Shut up and hang up. (thinking to himself), My average call time is improving.

• Heads, Tails, Edge: When Ratbert gets psychic powers.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Dogbert. Also Wally to a lesser degree. To clarify, Wally is at least as sociopathic as Dogbert, but he's not as heroic. But on the other hand, Wally's sociopathy tends to manifest in milder, less harmful ways. Usually.

  Wally: Apparently, I'm insane. But I'm one of the happy kinds.

• Hidden Depths: In one particular Sunday strip, Mordac reveals that he lost the file with his job description five years ago. He thought back to when his parents taught him that he could be anything he wanted to be, which led him to act as the Preventer of Information Services.
• Historical Domain Character: Rasputin, Albert Einstein and "Wilt Gandhi."
• Homemade Inventions: Dilbert regularly built these in the early days.
• How Did You Know? I Didn't: During Dogbert's stint as a media trainer he tries a mock interview with the CEO to see how he handles pressure, demanding, "ARE YOU A STINKING WEASEL TRYING TO PASS AS HUMAN?!!!" That's exactly what he is.

  CEO: (removing mask to reveal weasel head) What gave it away?

  Dogbert: Honestly, it was a lucky guess.

• Human Head on the Wall: One strip had Dilbert and Dogbert visiting a guy who had a bunch of creepy hunting trophies on his wall; they leave when he gets to his (former) neighbors.
• Hypocritical Humor: One strip has Dilbert say he's worried about pollution and its effect on Earth's future. Dogbert happily points out that without having kids, this generation can waste the world and not care about the future. Dilbert says, "But someday I want to have kids". Dogbert says "Let's hope they aren't as selfish as you."
• I'm a Humanitarian: A pilot intentionally crashes planes into the same remote mountain over and over so he can eat the passengers.
• Idiot Houdini: The pointy-haired boss.
• Implausible Deniability: Wally tells the PHB that he's late for work because his cart wouldn't start in the cold weather. The PHB says it's a warm day, but Wally blames the wind chill for his car trouble. Later, he admits to Dilbert that he doesn't even have a car.
• Impossible Pickle Jar: Dilbert has trouble opening a jar. Dogbert tries to show him how to do it, but he can't open it, either; he thinks to himself, "This would have worked in Family Circus." Dogbert then gives the jar to Bob the dinosaur, who just smashes it.
• Improbable Hairstyle: Alice.
• Incompetence, Inc.: Every member of management, and quite a few of the employees, is incompetent, evil, crazy, or all three. How the company actually stays in business is never explained.
• Inhuman Resources
• Insane Troll Logic: frequently invoked with the Boss, Catbert and other management characters. Here is a classic example:

  Alice: Have you noticed that every time we disagree, I'm eventually proved correct?

  PHB: Yes, but I'm always right initially!

  • More recently Dilbert's coworkers have been using it to be right in their conversations with him.
• Internet Safety Aesop: Parodied in one strip: Dilbert is an insomniac and trying to work out a problem he's brought home from work which the Pointy-Haired Boss is pressing him to resolve. Finally, Dilbert arrives at a solution, and he immediately emails the PHB with the update but does not choose his words carefully enough. Dogbert immediately informs him he has also hit Send All on the email.

  Hi. it's two in the morning, I'm sitting here in my underwear, and I thought of you.

• Inventor of the Mundane: Dilbert's great-grandfather was the inventor of sliced bread, the greatest thing since unsliced bread.
• It Came from the Fridge: In this strip, the mold in the fridge gains sentience and gets a job in the company's Human Resources department.
• It's a Long Story: A favorite parody device.

  Wally: I will make Loud Howard your cubicle neighbor in the next office unless you give me your immortal soul!

  Dilbert: (later) ...Fortunately, I convinced him to take my laser printer instead.

  Dogbert: What did I say that sounded like "Tell me about your day"?

• It's Been Done: Dilbert's Max-10 energy transfer model.

  Dogbert: Did the name "electric stove" occur to you at any time?

• Jurisdiction Friction: Engineering and Marketing are consistently at odds, with Marketing usually the Butt-Monkey.
• Karma Houdini: As part of the strip's point that the Corporation is soulless and unstoppable in its efforts to suck you in, the Pointy-Haired Boss and Catbert are shown doing whatever they want to underlings with no fear of repercussions (e.g., Alice accuses the Pointy-Haired Boss of sexism to no avail, and Catbert does all sorts of horrible things to employees which would normally lead to a lawsuit, if not criminal charges).
• The Key Is Behind the Lock: Dilbert tells an IT guy that his network password isn't working, and the guy tells him to fill out a help request online or send an e-mail about the problem; Dilbert can't do either of these things because his network password isn't working.
• Kicked Out of Heaven: In an early arc, Dogbert died and, on account of being a dog, got into Heaven. He was quickly thrown out and rendered mortal again after abusing his power and giving them a bad name.
• "Kick Me" Prank: Dilbert thinks his co-workers have put a sign on his back, and leaves work early to avoid being slapped on the back constantly. Turned out there was no sign, but the men's room was out of paper towels and they were using Dilbert's shirt to dry their hands.
• Kill and Replace: Killing your customers and replacing them with body doubles that place bigger orders is a preferred technique in the sales department.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All:
  • The PHB acts like one of these on occasion. For example, he once said that Dilbert's new design would not work in the real world, and Dilbert replied that the design was already widely used in the real world.

  Dilbert: I can come back later if you need time to concoct additional uninformed criticisms.

  • Dogbert did this deliberately when he decided to spend more time criticizing things he didn't understand (because he's just obnoxious like that):

  Dogbert: I say we should flat-tax the Kyoto Treaty all the way back to the Security Council!
  Dilbert: Wouldn't that be unfair to stem cells?
  Dogbert: Bah!

• Lack of Imagination: In one strip, Dogbert does a word association exercise with the employees to "unleash the creativity that the company has suppressed." He says, "chair", and the pointy-haired boss offers: "Donut?" All the others immediately answer "donut" as well.
• Laborious Laziness:
  • Wally has been shown to be very active in his efforts to not do any work.
  • Dilbert once created an elaborate "stealth business suit" to avoid getting assignments at work. Sound dampers prevented him from hearing anything people said, special polymers prevented sticky notes from attaching to the suit, and his cell phone and pager were encased in lead so he wouldn't get any calls. This led to a Headphones Equal Isolation moment when he didn't hear Dogbert trying to remind him that it was Saturday.
• Lazily Gender-Flipped Name: In this strip, the boss tries to give a certificate originally meant for Wally to Alice instead. He hastily corrects the name on the certificate to Alice's supposed "Indian name", "Wallyina".
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In this strip

  PHB: We're not made of ink.

  Dilbert: Why'd I just get the chills?

  PHB: Me too. It feels like some sort of forbidden knowledge.

  • Again:

    Alice: That's ridiculous. It sounds like the plot of a poorly written story arc.

  • In a Guest Strip by the creator of Luann:

    Dilbert: I feel oddly drawn to watch Days of Our Lives.

    Wally: You look oddly drawn.

• Living Dinosaurs: After Dilbert proves mathematically that it's impossible for the dinosaurs to have become totally extinct, a dinosaur character is introduced. Turns out they've just been hiding this entire time. (Incidentally, Dilbert's conclusion is approximately correct: some dinosaur species survived by, more or less, evolving into birds.)
• Literal-Minded: In this strip , PHB asks Asok to throw Carl "under the bus" because he "choked the pooch", Asok angrily says he will take care of it. Then he says that he found a website that lists idioms, and that he had done some bad things.
• Lost in Transmission: In this strip, the Pointy-Haired Boss calls Dilbert and says "Go through my desk and look up the billing codes". Due to poor cell phone reception in the Boss's area, what Dilbert hears is "Go throw my desk off the building." Due to the fact that nobody likes the boss, Dilbert and Alice do just that the next strip.
• Lopsided Dichotomy: In "The Dilbert Principle", Scott Adams describes the two possible results of a career in engineering:

  Risk: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people.

  Reward: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.

  • At the end of a Dilbert arc, Dilbert wonders why he's sitting naked in a trash can, and Dogbert explains:

  "Either you were killed by wild deer and we cloned you back to life from your old garbage... or... you saved a lot of money on an aboveground pool."

• Ludicrously Unwashed Object: In one comic, Wally "logically" concludes that it's pointless to wash bath towels, because "When I emerge from the shower, I'm the cleanest object in the universe. My towels get cleaner every time they touch me." But at the end, he gives away the results of following his own advice, when he wonders, "Speaking of which, are towels supposed to bend?"

    M-R 

• Mad Scientist: In the first comic, Dilbert decided that they should work along more classic lines, like Doctor Frankenstein. However Dogbert wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea of playing Igor.
• Made of Bologna: The Thursday 5 June 2014 strip has the company robot neatly detach Topper's head mid-sentence, revealing reddish bologna and a mounting hole. Fortunately, Topper being Topper, he simply remounts his head on its neck stump, and is good to go.
• Marshmallow Dream: Wally has a strange dream about getting smarter by willing it so, with his forehead expanding to match, and wakes up with his pillow missing. As Dilbert comments:

  Wow, you woke up in the wrong joke!

• Mathematician's Answer: In one strip Dilbert complains that he sent the PHB an email with three options, to which the PHB replied "Yes." The PHB, who forgot about the email, asks him to send it to him again, and then replies in the same way.
• Meaningful Job or Cushy Job: Parodied in one comic, in which Phil gives Dilbert the choice between two "hideous fates": high pay for meaningless work, or low pay for meaningful work. Dilbert is thrilled since both options are better than his current job.
• Meaningful Name: The company Dilbert and co work for is called "Path-E-Tech Management", due to a number of mergers.
  • The company once had plans to change their name to "Stinking Weasels Incorporated" with the motto "We steal in ways you've never even heard of". The fact that the board of directors actually considered this name change should tell you something.
  • Also, Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services, has a name that is very nearly a reversal of CD-ROM.
  • LOUD HOWARD! Elbonians are an interesting example, and then you have the animalberts. If Catbert's a cat and Dogbert's a dog, does that make Dilbert a pickle?
    • Or something much worse?
  • Scott Adams even pulled this off in real life. When, for a newspaper article, he posed as a famous consultant, he used the pseudonym "Ray Mebert."
  • Peri Noid, an employee whose name sounds similar to "paranoid" and who believes that everyone else in the office is secretly plotting against her.
• Megaton Punch: Alice has an interesting one: She'll tell someone that she'll do something to them so hard that an odd effect will happen, such as snapping someone's suspenders so hard they'll end up in next Thursday, or punching an MBA so hard that everyone with an MBA will feel it. The actual action is skipped, but the end panel implies that what she speaks is truth.

  Alice: *thinks* Uh-oh, intuition is activating the Fist of Death.

  • The final panel of one such strip is actually captioned "sometime next week", and features Alice's antagonist slumped unconscious across the threshold of a time portal!
• Meteorite of Doom: Parodied in an early strip where Dilbert and Dogbert discover dinosaurs have been living in secret (in their house, no less) since the K-T extinction: the effect of the impact was apparently "highly exaggerated". Cue flashback panel of a car-sized boulder landing on some poor sod dinosaur, who is Squashed Flat.

  "Ha ha, Larry! Ha-ha!"

• Millennium Bug: Generally mocked in the strip, as when Dogbert deliberately spreads Y2K fears on the grounds that 2000 is "big and ROUND!" Played straight, however, in the TV show.
  • Interestingly the TV show not only played it straight, but dealt with a more realistic problem and outcome where they have to update the company's outdated mainframe rather than the crazy, apocalyptic themes of other Y2K based comedy. That's a different episode and a different cause.
• Mining for Cookies: Dilbert once built a computer to predict the future, and got back a prediction that within five years all of humanity would be enslaved by evil squirrels in their nut mines.
• Misery Poker: The recurring character Topper is built around this trope, bragging (or complaining) that his accomplishment or suffering is greater than whoever he's talking to. He'll go to extreme lengths to prove it.
• Misophonia Gag:
  • A couple of strips are based on Alice's annoyance with some sounds in the office:
  • The boss hires a former terrorist to design the software's user interface. The noises he picks to play include nails on a fingerboard, the sound of vomiting, and a bird hitting a window, and those sounds are for when a user does something right. When the user makes a mistake, he has the software play the sound of a vomiting bird hitting a chalkboard. Dilbert is distressed by the former and faints when he hears the latter.
• Monkeys on a Typewriter: According to Dogbert, Dilbert's poem could be written by three monkeys in ten minutes.
• Moral Guardians: In one strip, Dilbert makes a device that filters out all morally questionable material from television programs. The only thing that the device approves is weather reports ... at first. Then there's a weather report about a huge tornado, which could be considered violent, so the device starts filtering weather reports as well, which Dilbert declares a success.
• Motionless Makeover: Dogbert takes advantage of Dilbert being in a "game trance" and stacks dishes on his head.
• Multi Boobage: This strip
• Mundane Fantastic: Talking animals that run corporations (sadistically, of course), or even the U.N. for a short time, various semi-human personifications of office inhabitant types (from a moth-man attracted by meetings, to a parasitic consultant that burrowed through the Pointy-Haired Boss to get to his wallet, to an evil Youthful Executive who was killed and possessed), a garbage man who invents time travel and species-changing rays because he hates to see it done wrong, and dinosaurs hiding behind couches instead of going extinct. And nobody bats an eye while the world remains roughly the same as ours, for a given value of "same". According to Adams himself, people keep writing to him to tell him how realistic the strip is. He figures it's because it's impossible to exaggerate selfishness so much it's unrealistic.
  • This can get oddly inconsistent at times. When Zimbu the Monkey was introduced, he was said to have "learned language skills at the zoo", the joke being that this was enough to make him a better engineer than his human coworkers because of his Prehensile Tail. This in a comic where all animals seem to be sentient...
• Mundane Utility: In an early strip, Dilbert invents an antigravity chemical, which is marketed as... uh... that is... look, just read it.
• Must Have Caffeine:
  • Wally got sent to rehab for a severe coffee addiction, but he relapsed right after he was discharged. The fact that the coffee rehab centre was right next to Starbucks World Headquarters might have had something to do with this.
  • Carol's doctor suggested she switch to decaf, so she replaced all of the office coffee with decaf for her convenience. The other employees were soon sprawled on the floor in a near-comatose state.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: In one strip, Dilbert invites a pretty coworker to lunch. To his excitement, she agrees! Then she asks if it would be ok to invite a male coworker to go over some work with him. She proceeds to invite the coworker without bothering to wait for Dilbert's reluctant yes. She then describes the group as "The Two Musketeers plus Dilbert" and disagrees when Dilbert asserts there really were Three Musketeers. Then, the woman suddenly realizes that she needs to be elsewhere, leaving the two male coworkers by themselves. Dilbert's remaining coworker then says that they are like the One Musketeer.
• Naked People Are Funny: Mike the Vegan boasts about using no animal products whatsoever. Dilbert points out that Mike's clothes are made by machines that use coal and oil, and coal and oil were originally dead dinosaurs ^note in fact, almost all fossil fuels formed from plant matter deposited long before the dinosaurs existed. In the next panel, Mike arrives at work naked, thinking about how he should start making exceptions to his beliefs.
• Negative Continuity: Most notably, Dogbert takes over Dilbert's company once every two months or so. (The animated series had even more Negative Continuity, regularly featuring The End of the World as We Know It.)
• Never My Fault:
  • The PHB's attitude through and through. In one comic, he says that whenever he and Dilbert talk, he ends up yelling, which must mean Dilbert has poor interpersonal skills and forces him to take a class to improve them. Dilbert responds: "It looks like you've gained weight. Would you like me to exercise to take care of that too?"
  • Tina double-subverts this: when she's on the cusp of realizing that her low pay is her own fault, she pulls another party to blame out of thin air in this strip.
• No Fourth Wall: Parodied when Scott gets stuck in the comic, and must get home in an homage to The Wizard of Oz.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Dilbert finds a wallet and decides to return it to its owner. Said owner is a career criminal who forces Dilbert to hand over his own wallet, and then slap himself.
• NO INDOOR VOICE: LOUD HOWARD!
• No Intelligent Life Here: Used in this strip from 1993, where Dilbert is trying to rein in his co-worker's sales pitch:

  Sales Guy: And our product has a thirty terabit RAM cache, just like your company needs. Tell him, Dilbert.
  Dilbert: It has no RAM.

  Sales Guy: And it's capable of detecting tachion field emissions.

  Dilbert:

  You're confusing us with "

  Star Trek

  " again, Stan.

  Sales Guy: We'll build that stuff into the next free upgrade.

  Customer: We'll take it!

  Dilbert: [thinking] Beam me up, Spock. There's no life on this planet.

• No Mouth: Dilbert, except when he's suitably pissed off.
  • Dilbert originally never had a mouth. Then the TV show routinely gave him a mouth when speaking. Since then Adams has increasingly slipped.
• No Name Given: Dilbert, Wally, Alice and Asok do not have last names. The Boss has no name at all. Neither does the company.
  • Turned into a running joke in the cartoon regarding the Boss. He would often sign something, and the name he signed with would be promptly brought up, only for the Boss to reveal it to be an alias of some sort. The one time he apparently did use his real name, it wasn't actually mentioned.
  • It's been theorized that Wally's last name is Norman.
• Non-Human Sidekick: Dogbert to Dilbert. Then again, from Dogbert's perspective, Dilbert is the sidekick...and the reader might agree.
• Non-Indicative Name: Dogbert's Tech Support. If you call this hotline, you will receive no support whatsoever.
• Non-Residential Residence: Dilbert's Disappeared Dad has been living inside of the local mall since December of 1992 (turning into a kind of shaman-like Urban Legend amongst the people who go there) and has no plan of leaving any time soon (if ever) because one of the restaurants has an "all you can eat" buffet and Dilbert's Dad absolutely ''has not eaten all he could eat" just yet.
• No Swastikas: When strips involving the Cubicle Gestapo were shown in newspapers, it was changed to "Police" to avoid complaints. Ironically, the "Gestapo" versions appeared in the book collections... including the one named "Fugitive from the Cubicle Police".
  • The "Right-Supremacist" Elbonians from the TV show have what appears to be Nazi armbands. Upon closer inspection, the emblem is a capital "R", slanted to the right.
• Nothing but Skin and Bones: A short sequence of some early strips observed Dilbert's date with a supermodel, who was drawn as a literal skeleton, and did not eat on their dinner date but instead simply sniffed the mints.
• Now You Tell Me?: Dilbert hands the PHB his final design for Project Zebra after working night and day for weeks to meet the deadline, only for the PHB to say that he cancelled the project a month ago and had been meaning to tell Dilbert about it.
• Obviously Fake Signature: In some strips, Dogbert sells autographs supposedly made by famous people. In one such strip, he offers a baseball signed by Jesus. In another, he offers a ball signed by Martin Luther. When the prospective customer says he was looking for one signed by Martin Luther King, Dogbert tells him to come back in a few minutes.
• Odd Job Gods: Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, the ruler of Lower Heck, punisher of sins too insignificant for Hell. Also the Demon of Demos, who looks exactly like Phil.
  • Also Dogbert, who in one early strip was made "God of Velcro" by Thor, in an attempt to modernize the Norse pantheon. Apparently, there's promotions to be expected at some point. Thor himself started out as "God of Static Cling". Interestingly, Dogbert at one point charged himself up on a carpet and appointed himself "Thor, Dog of Thunder."
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter: Every department of Dilbert's company is portrayed as incompetent and corrupt. Yet somehow, they're keeping themselves in business. Given the Crapsack World they live in, their competitors may be just as bad, and their customers are definitely stupid enough to keep buying their products.
  • Then again, the competitors are usually spoken of as being better than their company in every way.
• Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List: "Your pros are..waffles, eggs, bananas and milk."
• One-Word Title: Protagonist Title, first name variant.
• Only Sane Man: Seems to drift around. The boss even plays the role once in a while.
• The Operators Must Be Crazy:
  • Dogbert uses the phrase "How may we abuse you?" while he is a phone operator.
  • Dilbert calls the "Skeptics Association" because he wants them to prove that Ratbert isn't psychic. The operator ignores that subject; instead, he or she asks an endless series of skeptical questions to verify Dilbert's identity:
  Dilbert:

  My name is Dilbert. Yes, I can prove it; I have a passport and a driver's license. Well, yeah, it's easy to get a fake ID, but...

  
  (Hours later)
  Dilbert:

  Okay, what if I take a DNA test?

  No, I can't prove I've never been cloned!!^note Which he has.
• Our Vampires Are Different: One-time, but hey, it works.
• Out Sick: At one point, the Pointy-Haired Boss informs Dilbert that everyone who ate at the potluck developed food poisoning and he must absorb their workload because he's the sole healthy employee.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: Dogbert as a film reviewer is asked how much he'd need to be bribed say a New-Years-release comedy film is "funniest movie this year so far".
• Paintball Episode: In one strip, the Pointy-Haired Boss signs the team up for a paintball course as a "team building exercise", but instead of them going out to a paintballing field, he interprets it as hunting them in the office with a paintball gun, without them being aware of it. Obviously, they don't have on any protective gear, and in the confines of office spaces it would've been difficult to avoid "point blank" shots, both of which are major no-nos.
  • In one episode of the animated series, Alice starts one of these. In Dilbert's house. For an off-site meeting. She is notably one of the only ones who has protective gear aside from eyewear.
• Painting the Medium:

  Dilbert: ...What if you succeed in your campaign to censor opera? Before you know it, somebody will try to censor other forms of art.
  (Dogbert and Dilbert speak in empty speech bubbles.)

• Paranoia Fuel: Invoked by Dogbert as part of a scheme to dissuade people from returning faulty products; the security questions asked by the product recall phone-in are "What is your home address?" and "When do you shower?"
  • One strip had phone operators instructed to tell people that instead of getting an empty box, the customers had received an "invisible robot" who was "somewhere in the house, watching them."
• People Puppets: Literally, even.
• Phony Psychic: Dogbert became a "furniture psychic" for awhile. He wore a tall purple hat with a moon on it and passed along various messages from office furniture.

  Carol: The furniture psychic is here and he says my wastebasket is in love with my desk.

• Pick Up Babes With Babes: Dilbert tried this with fake babies. The first time he tossed two at a cashier who tried to avoid having her named revealed, and that was foiled. In another strip, this attracted a woman to him, but a fly was pestering him so much that he forgot he was trying to pick up girls and used one of the "babies" to smash it.

  Dilbert: It's tough love.

• Piecemeal Funds Transfer: The Pointy-Haired Boss says that he can only approve purchase orders up to $10,000, so he can't get the engineers the $1 million equipment they need without them filling out one hundred $10,000 purchase order requests.
• Playing Games at Work: This strip.
• Poison and Cure Gambit: When Dilbert's company decides to go into the medical industry, they decide to "create" business by unleashing a deadly virus.
• That Poor Plant: Wally's office plant, during the arc where he dumps his coffee grounds into it.
• Possession Presumes Guilt: In the Sunday 22 December 2013 comic, the pointy-haired boss uses a hydrogen filled drone to supervise his underlings. While looking at Ted, the boss notes Ted is wearing a wool sweater. Evidently, static charge ignited
• Prehensile Tail: A monkey has an advantage over humans because of his tail being able to use a mouse.
• Protagonist Title: Comic's protagonist is Dilbert and the comic is called...Dilbert.
• Psychic Powers: Multiple examples: a couple of Dilbert's weird dates are telepathic, in one arc Ratbert displays telekinesis and ESP until a skeptic "disproves" it, and in the late 2000s Asok turned out to have learned some immense powers at the Indian Institute of Technology.
• Publicity Stunt: Dilbert's company arranges to showcase their newest military product with a light show in New York Harbor. Wally is put in charge of the demonstration. The result is a Noodle Incident that New Yorkers call "the Stump of Liberty."
• Punctuality Is for Peasants: There was a strip where Dilbert and his boss are meeting with a company vice president: the VP tells them "I'm running late, but since I'm vice president you'll have to wait in the hallway. You'll be able to judge your relative worth by observing what things I do while you wait." Dilbert's boss then gets a worried look when Dilbert notes that the VP is teaching himself how to play the banjo.
• Punishment Box: The PHB tries this once as a management tactic. Dilbert just asks if "the Box" is bigger than his cubicle.
• Quirky Household: Dilbert's consists of himself, Dogbert, escaped lab rat Ratbert, and the occasionally-appearing Bob the Dinosaur (and, early on, Bob's mate Dawn and their son Rex).
• Recursive Reality: Dilbert becomes conscious of the fact that his world is a living parody and is shocked to learn that there is a comic called "Dilbert" detailing his life. When Dogbert reveals that their reality is the creation of a three dimensional being who frequently uses Dogbert as a mouthpiece Dilbert rejects the whole situation as absurd and moves on (although it eventually does become his religion).
• Red Pill, Blue Pill: Referenced in this comic, except with brain chips. Naturally, everyone picks the blue chip that keeps them in the illusion.
• Relax-o-Vision: Alice decides to introduce the "Company Sadist" to her "Fist of Death". The next panel is a "Note from the author" that reads, "If you are the sort of person who is influenced by comic strips, I assure you nothing bad or violent happens next. Alice and the sadist discuss their differences and become lifelong friends."

  Dilbert: (to Alice) What was in that big bag I helped you drag to the dumpster?

• Reluctant Gift: When Wally asks if he can spare a pen, Dilbert offers one to him only after bidding it farewell at length. Wally asks instead for a pen that Dilbert's had "less of an emotional relationship with".
• Remix Comic: The website invited people to make mashups of strips, but this feature was dropped as part of a major makeover of the site.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: Dinosaurs never went extinct and have been Faking the Dead by hiding in people's houses. According to Bob, the original extinction rumor started when a single dinosaur named "Larry" was hit by a meteor, but survived after heavy medical treatment.
• Retcon: When the nation of India made homosexuality a crime (yes, really), Scott Adams retaliated by turning Asok gay. This was announced by Dogbert directly to the reader. Later, an in-universe reason of "rewiring neural pathways" is given.
• Retconning the Wiki: One cartoon has the character Topper make a string of implausible claims about his achievements. When the other characters ask for proof, he replies "Give me ten minutes, then check Wikipedia."
• Robot Me: In one strip, the Pointy-Haired Boss announces the launch of a "Lazy Wally" robot that does nothing but "drink coffee, attend meetings, and complain."

  "Wally": THAT ROBOT WILL NEVER REPLACE ME!

  "Wally": Well, that just ruined my day.

• Robosexual:
  • In one storyline Alice dates the office robot to circumvent company policy against dating coworkers (he's not considered one), later dumping him for another robot. Another storyline reveals that he fathered a cyborg child with another human woman.
  • Both Wally and Dilbert have been romantically linked to their Amazon Alexas (in Dilbert's case, by a jealous Siri).
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Alice convinces Asok to go into the "Jeffries tube" in one strip. In a later book Scott admitted he messed up - it should be Jefferies tube.
• Ruritania: Elbonia again.

    S-Z 

• Safe, Sane, and Consensual: In one strip (28 August 2010), the Pointy-Haired Boss is trying to make people believe that slave labor is okay by pretending that "slave" really refers to the BDSM kind of slavery rather then economic exploitation of poor people. See the Happiness in Slavery page illustration.
• Sanity Ball: Every major worker at Dilbert's company is the Only Sane Man in their own way, and the Dysfunction Junction is partly kept going by the fact that everyone can trade off the job of "person who doesn't know what they're talking about."
• Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: In one strip, an "aging school bully" at the company demands Dilbert's lunch money with a threat to erase his data diskettes. Dilbert successfully retaliates by threatening to erase his name from the company payroll.
• Scrabble Babble:
  • Jequirity.
  • In the TV series, Comp-U-Comp plays "Wipqosn", then promptly hacks into all the online dictionaries in the world to add it.
• Self-Deprecation: Often done in regards to Adams' talent as an artist. Any strip with a poll (such as the ones to "fire" or retain characters) will feature an option along the lines of "Learn how to draw", while one early strip had Dilbert get sucked into the Internet, describing it as "a Calvin and Hobbes fantasy without the artistic look".
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: Dilbert mocks this trope regularly with such things at the "Wibsters Dictionary".
• Short-Distance Phone Call:

  Wally: I'm in a battle of wills with a guy who lets all of his calls roll over to voicemail. I do that too, so all day long we trade messages saying, "Call me," and then we ignore the incoming calls.
  PHB: Maybe he's out of the office.
  Wally: No, I can hear him. He's one cube over from me.

• Shout-Out: One episode from very early in the strip's run was featured in Garfield's 20th Anniversary Collection in 1998. The strip referenced a then-current fad involving little Garfield plushies with suction cups on car windows:

  Dilbert: The neighbors said you glued little suction cups on their kitten and stuck him on their car window.
  Dogbert: What's your problem, some kind of copyright infringement?

  • Adams wrote in his own seventh anniversary book that Jim Davis actually asked for the original of that strip, which he traded for one of Davis'.
  • Also, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time features a character named Toadbert.
  • To Top Gear in the 16th May 2010 strip, when the Pointy-Haired Boss introduces "software genius" Wolfgang (actually Wally):

    Pointy-Haired Boss: Some say his talent is a genetic mutation. Others say that God speaks to him in UNIX. All we know for sure is that he glows, and he never needs to eat.

  • When asked about money, Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light explains that Procter and Gamble pay him to stay away from them.
• Showing Up Chauvinists: Alice is a very competent engineer on par with Dilbert himself, and has surprised other characters by pointing out she's the highest-paid engineer in the department (when the joke doesn't require Wally to be the highest-paid engineer in the department, that is).
• Silicon Snarker: In the Sunday 26 May 2013 strip, Wally claims to have installed a neutrino sensor in the company robot, which can scan people to detect health problems. When the Pointy-Haired Boss gets scanned, the robot declares, "Dead man walking! Your brain is the size of a dried apricot. Your heart is more cheeseburger than human tissue. You will be dead in eleven days..." After the Boss runs off screaming, the robot asks why he was programmed to hate people. Wally responds that it was easier than inventing a neutrino sensor.
• Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: Parodied.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: VERY cynical for a light-humored newspaper comic strip.
• Smart Cetaceans: One strip had him trapped miles from shore while dolphins taunted him for hours ("Let's ask the humming fish to do the Jaws theme song...").
• Sock It to Them: The book Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless explains that, though tube socks and a paperweight make useless gifts by themselves, they can be combined into something useful for assaulting the gift-giver.
• Something Else Also Rises: Dilbert's tie is usually flipped up at the end. During one arc, Dilbert had a girlfriend who genuinely liked him. Adams took a poll to see whether his fans wanted Dilbert to get laid, and said that if it happened he'd draw Dilbert's tie straight. He did, but in a sequence of strips revolving around Liz telling him she was saving herself for marriage, written in a way to be highly open to interpretation. He later revealed that women overwhelmingly wanted him to get lucky while the men were split between the same position and not wanting him to get laid until they themselves did.
  • Dilbert's tie also flattened when he encountered "Antina, the non-stereotypical woman." Adams' comment: "I'm not sure what it means."
• Soul-Crushing Desk Job: Every character in Dilbert works such a job^exceptions(except for Dogbert and Ratbert who have whatever job is needed to make the desk jobs soul-crushing, rarely-seen artifact characters like Bob, Dilmom or the garbageman, and some one-shot characters like the plant waterer). The strip takes place in a bureaucratic hell-hole (with a boss who may literally be Satan) of an office populated by illogical and uncooperative employees who all seem to enjoy making each other miserable.
• Spontaneous Skeet Shooting: Dilbert has to fly into Elbonia to convince Dogbert to relinquish his rulership of that nation. Since Elbonia has no airlines, Dilbert must be launched from a giant slingshot, then hope to land on something soft. As bad timing would have it, Dogbert is at the landing site with a firearm in the Wednesday 9 October 1991 strip.
• Springtime for Hitler: Wally, who is based on a former co-worker of Adams who discovered that the company was offering a very generous severance package for the worst workers, and made it his goal to qualify. "Ordinarily this wouldn't have been as much fun to watch," wrote Adams, "but this man was one of the more brilliant people that I've met, and was completely dedicated to his goal."
  • According to the specialized collection What Would Wally Do?, "Wally 1.0" (Adams' name for the aforementioned co-worker) succeeded.
• Standard Office Setting: Dilbert primarily sets itself in the unnamed office where Dilbert works. The office itself is a caricature of real-life offices, with grossly incompetent managers, borderline insane HR employees, and a marketing department that seems to be intentionally running the company into the ground. While there are fantasy elements (the HR manager is a cat, one of the employees is a robot), the work is generally grounded in reality.
• Status Quo Is God: In order to keep it on the ball with current workplace culture. Even if the Pointy-Haired Boss learns his lesson, he'll forget it a few years down the line so he has to re-learn the lesson in a newer context. Perhaps, because of this, it's one reason it's kept going for a long time.
• Stealth Insult: Currently provides the picture for the trope page.

  PHB: And don't get me started about your overuse of colons.

  Dilbert: They remind me of you, sir.

  • Wally apparently delivers one of these to Alice when he tells her he admires her for valuing performance over appearance.

    Alice: Wait...if that was a compliment, why is my Fist of Death tingling?

• Stealth Pun: Adams loves these; perhaps the best ever followed a sequence when Dilbert invented tubular luggage out of "Pringles" cans and Dogbert referred to it as "Dorkage". This led to a strip where Dogbert addressed the readers directly.

  Dogbert: I recently received this angry letter from a mister "Dork". Mr. Dork informs me that the many people surnamed Dork are not amused by the recent usage of the word "dorkage" in the strip. He demands an apology. I apologize to all the Dorks who were offended. I hope we can put this behind us.

• Story Arc: Dilbert story arcs usually play themselves out in a few days to a week, soon returning to square one. The two longest-running story lines were an early series in which Dogbert becomes King of Elbonia, and a more recent one in which Dogbert takes over Dilbert's company, and Dilbert loses his job and spends weeks looking for work. Both plotlines took almost a month to resolve.
• Stupidest Thing I've Ever Heard:
• Stupid Future People: Series creator Scott Adams speculated the future would involve people doing less and less - as machines do more of the physical labour - and eating more and more readily accessible junk food, and not seeing a correlation between the two things. A series of cartoons shows the Dilbert characters rolling around on the floor of a futuristic house, huge fat blobs with vestigial arms and legs, perfectly happy with this state so long as the Internet provides entertainment and the food supply is uninterrupted.
• Suicide Dare: Played for Laughs in a strip where the boss is showing a new employee around, and asks Dilbert to show her the ropes. Dilbert shows her a noose. The last panel has her preparing to hang herself after she completes Dilbert's tour of working at Incompetence, Inc..
• Superficial Suggestion Box: When the Pointy-Haired Boss senses a creative idea being formed, he sets out a suggestion box to identify and destroy it.
• Super-Scream: When Loud Howard gets hysterical, his voice is known to hurl people backward several feet and cause building walls to crumble.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: PHB:

  I just wanted to address any rumors you may have heard. We are

  NOT

  planning on relocating the company to the South Pole where easily-trained

  native Eskimos

  will replace you.

  Dilbert: That's good, because Eskimos don't live at the South Pole.

  PHB (wide-eyed):

  Excuse me, I have to go make a phone call...

  • At one point, a feature article in a business publication refers to the leadership of Dilbert's company as "a bunch of morons." The PHB's way of countering the bad press is to make "We're not a bunch of morons!" the company's new marketing slogan.
• Swiss Bank Account: Dilbert once tried to withdraw money from the Bank Of Ethel, only to find out that Ethel had changed all the accounts to secret Swiss accounts without even notifying the bank's customers beforehand. Then when Dilbert asked for the password to his new secret account, Ethel refused to give it to him because "it's a secret."

  Dilbert: Then how do I get my money out?

  Teller: You're a bit slow in grasping the concept here.

• Talking Animal
• Take That!: One series of strips slammed Zippy the Pinhead with Dogbert's own comic, Pippy the Ziphead, because Bill Griffith had said, in Adams' words, "unkind things about Dilbert and me."
• Tele-Frag: A time-traveling future Wally materializes in a meeting, grabs a cup of coffee and returns to his time with a cheery warning about Temporal Mutability, oblivious to the fact that he just killed an employee in this fashion.

  Present Wally: Let me be the first to say that this feels awkward.

• Temporal Abortion: In one comic, Dilbert describes to the Pointy-Haired Boss how the deadline for an assignment is blatantly impossible—so instead, he's going to focus all his efforts on inventing a time machine. The PHB assumes Dilbert intends to use the time machine to go back and finish the assignment on time, but Dilbert corrects him: he's actually planning to find the PHB's parents in the past and educate them on the proper use of contraceptives.
• Theme Naming: Everything Dilbert owns is given the prefix "Dil" or the suffix "Bert" For example, he drives the Dilcar, and has "Dilmom" instead of a properly-named mother.
  • According to Word of God, Dogbert's original name was Dildog before the cartoon was syndicated.
• They Killed Kenny: A variation appears in the form of Ted the Generic Guy. He is repeatedly fired for more or less ridiculous reasons, only to be back to be fired again in true Negative Continuity style. (He also died in at least three strips.) Either there are a lot of guys named Ted, or this trope is in play. The cartoon implies that Ted is so generic, nobody can find or identify him, so other people get the blame for his work.
  • The cartoon actually comes right out and says that there may be more than one Ted in the company, nobody really knows.

  Dilbert: Ted, I want you to...Ted. Ted! TED!!

  Ted the Generic Guy: My name's not Ted.

  Dilbert: What is it then?

  Ted the Generic Guy: Well, it's Ted, but not the Ted you're thinking of.

  • The comic eventually does the same.

  Ted: My name is Ted. I'm applying for the job of generic white guy.

  PHB: We just lost our Ted. You look perfect for the job.

  Ted: Is there anything I should know about the job?

  PHB: It doesn't end well.

• Toll Booth Antics: Inverted in one comic. Toll booth attendants make Dilbert nervous, and he doesn't know why, so he goes to extra lengths not to annoy them: he turns his radio down, makes sure he has exact change for the toll, and always wishes them a good morning.
• Trolling Translator: This strip has translators at the UN intentionally giving wrong translations as a "reckless prank" in the words of the narrator.

  Turban-wearing translator: He says "Who wants my parking space by the elevator?"

• Trust-Building Blunder: Though in this case, the person at fault wasn't the person catching (Dilbert) but the one falling (the boss, who fell forwards, prompting Dogbert to remark that maybe trust isn't the issue here).
• Truth in Television: there are university-level business and management courses where Dilbert is required reading.
  • Ask any Cubicle Drone: Dilbert's not a comic, it's a documentary.
  • It helps that a small but significant percentage of the strips are directly based on reader submitted true stories. And of course, he drew heavily on his own experience for some of his major characters.
  • The creator has stated that many times he has done a strip with the most outrageously stupid management blunder he could think of, only to have readers write in with far more outrageous stupid management blunder stories from real life.
• Ugly Baby: One strip has a flashback scene which shows Wally as a baby. He has an identical face to his modern-day counterpart, with face-obscuring square glasses and puckered lips, and someone is shown looking into his stroller and being caught off guard by his ugliness.
• Unicorns Are Sacred: When he is assigned to the Marketing department as a punishment, Dilbert discovers a group of otherworldly Elf-like types who boast every Friday as unicorn barbecue day. (Naturally, the eternal loser Dilbert gets the bun with the horn in). But elsewhere in the Dilbert universe, we are told Marketing is a place of great and terrible primal evil... (in other strips, Marketing and Sales conspire to make life Hell for engineers by selling things they haven't designed yet. Hell: Marketing sell things that haven't been invented yet and which are generally scientifically impossible...).
• Unions Suck: In one Sunday strip, Dogbert forms a union that he says will help Dilbert and his coworkers. However, the last panel has him saying they should talk about union dues, implying he actually started it for his own benefit.
• Unnecessarily Cruel Rejection: One strip has Dogbert giving women advice on how to reject guys who ask them out, and he recommends using different tactics based on how much of a loser the guy is. The last one states "but for the truly pathetic, it is acceptable to use sadistic and malicious lies". This is illustrated by a woman telling Dilbert "Wait by the phone. I'll call sometime before Saturday to let you know."
• Unusual Euphemism: "Oh, carp."
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Dilbert has a lab accident that turns him into a sheep. When he starts to explain this at a meeting, Wally simply asks why people think their problems are interesting to other people.
• Unwanted Assistance: One-shot character "The Too Helpful Guy", who in-universe Flanderises a character saying they like something into assuming they're obsessed with it, and giving them gifts accordingly.
• Uranus Is Showing: Dogbert's ad agency came up with a new name for Dilbert's company by randomly combining words from astronomy and electronics which turns out to be "Uranus-Hertz".

  Adams: This was banned from at least one newspaper.

• Video Call Fail: This provided a good source of humour during the strips released during COVID lockdown. One notable example is this strip, in which a fellow employee shows Dilbert his screen, only to get the wrong screen (which is not shown to the reader) and ends up quitting in embarrassment. Despite this, Dilbert thought it was the "best one ever".
• Video Phone: One strip involves Dilbert being the first person in the city to own a videophone. He then sits next to the phone, waiting for other people to buy them so he can call them.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Dilbert and Dogbert, both to each other, and to Ratbert.
• Wardrobe Flaw of Characterization: Dilbert's tie is always curving upwards rather than staying flat against his torso. It's supposed to represent how Dilbert has no control over his environment. He can't even make his tie behave.
• Weapons-Grade Vocabulary: Alice has foul language that actually affects people. She then accidentally used this on her boss at a meeting about it. This, then at meeting.
• Wearing It All Wrong: One early strip (during the George H.W. Bush administration) has Dogbert comment that Vice President Dan Quayle is still a normal guy: "He puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us." The final panel shows the Veep not just wearing his pants on his head, but trying to shove his upper body into one leg. His wife facepalms and thinks, Not again...
• Wildlife Commentary Spoof: This strip: is here
• Windmill Crusader: Many surreal jokes are based on the premise that one character lives in his own little reality. Sadly, this is often a character who has power — or who gains power by enforcing her crazy perceptions on others.
• Windmill Political: While also playing it straight sometimes, Dilbert is famous for a deconstruction of this trope: Dogbert openly advises people to pick a harmless person and make him seem like a threat. Then destroy him, and have people reward you for saving you from the "threat". (The deconstruction part is that Dogbert is completely open and public with his cynicism, thus defeating the purpose.)
  • This is a variation on one of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. The book is in play.
• World of Dumbass: Dilbert's company makes products that are lethal, hazardous, useless, or otherwise unfit for sale, yet enough customers buy them to make the CEO stupefyingly rich. Dilbert's co-workers, especially those in non-engineering departments, also seem to be moronic, and survive only by lying to their bosses about how useful and productive they are.
• World of Jerkass: It's a rare character that never openly admits to taking pleasure in other people's pain.
• World of Pun: Too many to go into, but during the early years of Dilbert, Scott Adams was really, really into puns (very little office humor was involved; Dilbert was ostensibly an engineer just to provide a context for nerd-jokes and nerdy jokes).
• World of Snark: Everyone is either a Deadpan Snarker or the punchline for one.
• X Days Since: there's a strip where somebody is putting up a sign that reads "8 days since the last accident", and then falls off the office chair he was using as a step stool.

  Dilbert: How ironic.
  Worker: No, it was ironic when it happened 8 days ago.

• You Answered Your Own Question: During a sales presentation in this strip
• You Didn't Ask: Apparently, when asking the lab to do a test, the question "Can you do it?" is not implied.
• You Know What You Did: parodied in this strip.
• You Say Tomato: Dogbert quoted this in a 1992 strip...to compare stimulating the economy to giving himself a tax break. Seen here.
• You Wanna Get Sued?: In the strip where Ratbert gets his name, the first one he suggests is "Mickey". Dogbert hurriedly declines it as a bad idea.

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