By P.G. Torrez
The brainpower of the University of California is well known. UC scientists have won 30 Nobel Prizes. They discovered vitamin E, plutonium and eight other transuranium elements. They created the first human vaccine by cloning the gene for the hepatitis B virus.
Perhaps not as well known are UC's contributions to humor. Prominent alums include two American icons, Rube Goldberg, whose elaborate contraptions made simple tasks amusingly complex, and Jay Ward, who helped create everpopular "Rocky and Bullwinkle."
This legacy continues with Scott Adams, the creator of "Dilbert," the cartoon hero of the workplace; Mike Judge, who depending on your perspective gets the credit or blame for conceiving the MTV doltish duo "Beavis and Butt-head"; and Gail Machlis, who explores the contemporary conundrum in "Quality Time."
If there's any common thread, it's that their humor is irreverent, making light of people and institutions that take themselves too seriously.
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert who earned his MBA at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 1986, has put his degree to good use.
Adams, 38, presides over an everexpanding empire that includes the cartoon strip, running in nearly 1,000 newspapers with more than 60 million readers; a popular World Wide Web site, The Dilbert Zone (http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert) that gets more than 55,000 "hits" a day; a Dilbert newsletter ("Dogbert's New Ruling Class") that has more than 110,000 subscribers; and a slew of Dilbert products such as polo shirts, caps, tshirts, calendars and mousepads. Adams also is a soughtafter speaker.
"My MBA has been hugely helpful," Adams says. "I run my cartoon like a business, using standard business theory."
Three years ago, Adams became the first syndicated cartoonist to publish his email address in his comic strip. A few months later, "Dilbert" who Adams describes as "an engineer in a large nameless corporation" was the first nationally syndicated comic strip to appear on America Online and the Internet.
Adams says he gets between 300 to 800 email messages a day, often from people sharing stories of harebrained work situations and bosses. Some end up as material for "Dilbert."
Dilbert's origin dates back to 1985 when Adams worked as an engineer for Pacific Bell in the San Francisco Bay Area. His doodles eventually took shape as a nerdy engineer and later ended up in his presentations at work. A coworker suggested naming the character Dilbert. Adams thought it fit.
In 1989, Adams put together a package of Dilbert strips and sent them to cartoon syndicates. Reaction was mixed. But United Media subsequently offered him a development contract. The first strip was published later that year.
"Dilbert" originally was only 20 percent business related. "After I printed my email address, people told me: we like business stuff a lot more," he says. So Adams concentrated more on the workplace and the foibles of management. "Dilbert's" popularity skyrocketed. United Media says "Dilbert" is the fastestgrowing newspaper comic strip.
Until he was laid off last August, Adams drew "Dilbert" before and after his fulltime job at Pacific Bell in San Ramon where he had worked for nearly nine years.
Now, Adams says he is working harder than ever. He is inundated with lucrative offers to increase the size of his bank account and feels he should "strike while the cliche is hot."
Dilbert's popularity has made Adams an expert on what he calls "cubicle culture." Readers are convinced that Adams has the pulse of American business practices as "Dilbert" depicts bureaucratic absurdities, management ineptitude and corporate stupidity. For this reason, business professors as well as managers of Fortune 500 companies like to use Dilbert strips for their slide shows and publications.
It is no surprise that Adams has taken on corporate culture with a new hardback business book, "The Dilbert Principle (A Cubicle's-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions)."
The book argues that the Peter Principle (competent workers are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence) should be recast as the Dilbert Principle: the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to where they can do the least damage management.
In 26 chapters and 336 pages, Adams mostly pokes fun at things in corporate life that don't make sense. He does, however, in the last chapter offer a "new company model." One of its underlying assumptions is that happy employees are more productive and creative than unhappy ones. He counsels companies to stay out of the way of its employees.
Adams writes: "Let employees dress any way they want, decorate their work spaces any way they want, format memos any way they want. Nobody has ever demonstrated that these areas have an impact on productivity. But when you "manage" those things you send a clear signal that conformity is valued above either efficiency or creativity. It's better to get out of the way and reinforce the message that you expect people to focus on what is important."
Jay Ward, who helped create Rocky and Bullwinkle, was a private and reclusive man except when it came to his alma mater, UC Berkeley. "Cal was dad's great love," says his daughter, Tiffany Ward." All I can tell you is that he always glowingly referred to Cal."
Ward, a Berkeley native who died at age 69 in 1989, was a major donor of the Berkeley campus and organized fundraising promotions and parties. In doing so, he sought to give back to UC for what he received as a student.
Although Ward was a "notorious cut-up" as a student, he forged a close relationship with thenUC President Robert Gordon Sproul who apparently saw something in the budding artist, Tiffany Ward says. Sproul wrote a letter of recommendation that helped Ward get admitted to Harvard business school after graduating from Berkeley, she says.
With his MBA, Ward returned to Berkeley in the 1940s and opened a real estate office. But right after the business opened, a truck lost its brakes, rolled down a hill and into the office, pinning Ward to the wall. Both his legs were broken. Ward is reported to have told friends: "Anybody who is in real estate in California and can't run better get out of the business."
As he convalesced, Ward hooked up with a childhood friend, Alexander Anderson. They came up with "limited animation" for TV, an unproven method to cut down the amount of celluloid drawings by emphasizing rapid camera movements across almost static movement. A voice track kept the story moving when frames didn't.
Using limited animation, Ward and Anderson created "Crusader Rabbit," the first cartoon show ever created specifically for TV. The series, first broadcast in 1949, featured puns and word play that were to become Ward's trademark.
"Crusader Rabbit" ended after two seasons on NBC and Ward returned to real estate. A few years later, he teamed up with Bill Scott to create "Rocky and His Friends," which first aired in 1959. The show featured Rocket J. (Rocky) Squirrel, Bullwinkle Moose, Mr. Big, a midget, and his cronies Boris Badenov and his aide Natasha Fatale.
The name Bullwinkle came from an auto dealership in Berkeley, says Tiffany Ward. "He loved that name. He drove by the dealership it had a slightly different spelling and said, "That's it!"
"Rocky and His Friends," which spoofed cliffhanging serials, ran from 1959 through 1961 on ABC. From 1961 to 1964, Ward and Scott produced for NBC "The Bullwinkle Show." It featured "Fractured Fairy Tales," "Peabody's Improbable History," "Aesop and Son" and "Adventures of Dudley DoRight," which eventually became its own series.
Ward and his associates also produce the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal commercials. their last cartoon series, "George of the Jungle," ran from 1967 to 1970.
Tiffany Ward attributes the "sensational writing of the show" for "Rocky and Bullwinkle's" continued popularity. "It carried through on multilevels for parents and kids."
Ward's legacy, his daughter says, is humor. "People enjoyed and laughed at his productions. That was his goal in life."
It's not often that you find a cartoonist listed in the dictionary.
Look for Walt Disney or Charles Schultz and you won't find them. But look up Rube Goldberg and there he is with the definition: Adj. Of, relating to, or being a contrivance that accomplishes by complicated means what apparently could have been accomplished simply.
It's a tribute to the far-reaching impact of Goldberg's "inventions."
Reuben Lucious Goldberg, a 1904 UC Berkeley engineering graduate, expressed in his cartoons America's fascination with a better mousetrap and the seeming desire to make a job more difficult than it should be.
In Irving Stone's "Let There Be Light," published in 1968 to honor UC's centennial, Goldberg gave credit for "one of the principal props of my career as a cartoonist" to an engineering professor, Freddy Slate. The professor had devised the Barodik to measure the earth's weight with "a series of pipes and tubes and wires and chemical containers and springs and odd pieces of weird equipment which made it look like a dumping ground for outmoded dentists' furnishings," Goldberg wrote.
"Like the Barodik, my "Rube Goldberg" inventions are incongruous combinations of unrelated elements which cause a chain reaction that accomplishes something quite useless. It points up the human characteristic of doing things the hard way."
Goldberg, born in San Francisco, studied engineering at Berkeley because his immigrant father was footing the bill. But the younger Goldberg fancied himself an artist.
After graduation, Goldberg took a job as an engineer for the city of San Francisco. But six months is all he could take. He landed a job at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1904 and began his career as a cartoonist. In 1907, he moved to the New York Evening Mail.
He drew his first "Rube Goldberg" invention a complicated machine that purported to help people lose weight in 1914. The inventions were immensely popular.
He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist from 1921 through 1964.
In 1948, at a time when he was drawing political cartoons, Goldberg won a Pulitzer Prize for a cartoon about the terrible dilemma of atomic power. He died in 1970 at age 87.
Last October, Goldberg was among 20 American cartoonists honored with a U.S. postal stamp commemorating the 100th birthday of the comic strip, one of the nation's only indigenous art forms. The stamp, naturally, depicts one of Goldberg's inventions.
Gail Machlis was born and raised in Berkeley. Her father, Leonard, was a UC Berkeley botany professor and administrator. She (a French major) and her two sisters and brother graduated from Berkeley.
More than anything, it's Berkeley (where she still lives) that has influenced her cartoon, "Quality Time," a slice of life among stylish singles, harried parents and their children.
"To some degree, it's (the cartoon) a way of processing being part of Berkeley, a way of thinking, bringing a certain skepticism about it," says 41yearold Machlis (pronounced Mackless). "I think a lot of my cartoons are taking a second look at things that are accepted."
"For instance, in one of my cartoons, two mothers are with their kids and one of them says, "We're only looking at preschools with a no-white-sugar policy. It's P.C. (political correctness) to the umpteenth degree where it doesn't belong. I think Berkeley provides a lot of fodder for that it always has."
Machlis is one of the few women whose cartoons run in daily newspapers. "Quality Time," which first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle eight years ago, is in about 20 newspapers now, including the Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury News and San Diego UnionTribune. Her humor also has appeared in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Ms.
In 1992, a book of her cartoons, Quality Time and Other Quandaries, was published by Chronicle Books and she's looking for a publisher for three children's books.
After graduating from UC Berkeley, Machlis had set her sights on law school. She got a job at a law firm and took up court reporting to support herself. "But several years of secretarial work and court reporting convinced me I didn't want to be a lawyer," she says.
Machlis began drawing cartoons seriously in 1988 after leaving a writing program at Mills College. Married with two daughters, she put herself on a rigid schedule, sending her cartoons to magazines and newspapers weekly. She hit paydirt in 1989 when the San Francisco Chronicle offered her a weekly spot on the front of its Sunday Punch. From there, her cartoons were syndicated.
Machlis, who works from her Berkeley home, says she tries to come up with seven cartoons a week. She has a backlog of about 200 cartoons, which she can use when she hits a dry spell or when she and her family take a vacation.
When she gets ideas for a cartoon, she writes them down in a notebook. She records conversations she overhears when out with her family, running errands or shopping. Sometimes her daughters provide inspiration. "If they say something funny, they get a percentage," Machlis says. "It's only fair."
Beavis and Butt-head is the most popular show on the MTV cable network, but creator Mike Judge won't allow his daughters to watch it. And it's probably not for his mother, a elementary school librarian, either, he concedes.
"It's pretty vulgar sometimes," says Judge, a 1985 UC San Diego physics graduate. "I don't mind it being vulgar if it's really funny. But I'll be the first to admit that there are times when it's vulgar and not funny. And that's when I toss and turn at night and say, "Why did I record that line?"
Some people find it ironic that the man accused of dumbing-down America's youth studied physics at UCSD, worked for a defense contractor as an engineer and was a part-time graduate student in math.
Judge, 33, a fan of Jerry Lewis, the Three Stooges and Monty Python, is a longtime comedy buff. Realizing that stand-up comedy wasn't his bag, he gravitated toward animation after attending an animated film festival in Dallas in 1991.
At the time, Judge had left his engineer's job and was playing bass in a band. With a used $200 Bolex camera, he put together a short film in early 1992 featuring "Beavis and Butt-head" that caught the eye of a female MTV producer.
The scraggly teenagers are based on a composite of hardrock loving, junior high classmates who delighted in tormenting Judge when he was an honors student growing up in Albuquerque, N.M., the creator says. He calls those times the worst years of his life.
But they provided fodder for Judge's financial security. The success of "Beavis and Butt-head" have earned Judge appearances on David Letterman's show, a cover of Rolling Stone magazine and a deal for TV and movie projects for the Fox Network when his MTV contract expires in two years.
Later this year, "Beavis and Butt-head" will debut in a full-length Paramount Pictures film for the big screen. Judge, who provides the voices for "Beavis and Butt-head," is directing.