The centerpiece of “Saturday Night Live‘s” March 4 “Weekend Update” segment was a skewering of “Dilbert” comic creator Scott Adams, who went on a racist rant last month that spurred dozens of newspapers to drop his long-running syndicated cartoon strip.
Michael Che, co-anchor of “Update” with Colin Jost, interviewed the cubicle-dweller himself, the cartoon character Dilbert, in an effort to understand how Adams could have gone so off the rails in suggesting that white people are under threat from Black people.
Over the course of a controversial YouTube video posted Feb. 22, Adams described how he purposely moved to a community with no Black residents and urged white viewers to “get the hell away from Black people.” He also called the Black community a “hate group.”
On “Weekend Update,” Che chided Jost about Adams: “So he lives in your community, huh?”
The portrayal of the pupil-less Dilbert character fell to “SNL” featured player Michael Longfellow, who came out to sit across from Che on the “Update” anchor desk in full Dilbert regalia: “Michael, I think I can speak for myself and the entire all-white staff at the ‘Dilbert’ offices when I say this is a total shock. I mean, most cartoonists are weird. But racist weird? Let’s just say, I never got that memo.”
Dilbert stops by the Update desk! pic.twitter/uYaXx8WALP
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) March 5, 2023
Longfellow donned a large rubber head piece designed to emulate the cartoonish wavy contours of the character’s head. “My hair is skin,” Dilbert lamented. “It’s the great tragedy of my life.”
Embodying Dilbert, Longfellow weaves an elaborate tale of how a spontaneous decision to take a day off from work led to him having an epiphany about an inevitable race war. By reading the works of Black radicals and socialist thinkers such as Karl Marx, Longfellow’s Dilbert character is aligned with far more progressive ideologies than those espoused by his creator.
“Are you ready? Because Dilbert is ready,” Longfellow roars. “I woke up this morning ready to take to the streets and paint the city with the blood of a white man.”
