Elbonia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Republic of Elbonia is a fictional country from Scott Adams' comic strips Dilbert and Plop: The Hairless Elbonian. It is an extremely poor, fourth-world country that has recently abandoned Socialism. Its citizens and culture seem to resemble those of Eastern Europe. Most of the nation is covered with waist-deep mud, which the residents use to build houses. Much of the economy is also mud-based. In a recent cartoon the Elbonians discover that the mud is caused by an abundance of oil and coal near the surface. Scott Adams has said that many people think of the mud as snow, a limitation of the black-and-white daily strips, but that either way is fine with him. He has commented that Elbonia is essentially based on most Americans' stereotypes of a developing country with immense problems.
Elbonian pigs have intelligence and social standing comparable to the humans and are sometimes shown as having a role in the government. In an early Dilbert strip, Wally orders a mail-order bride from Elbonia, only to receive a pig dressed in women's clothing.
Adams created the country in order to allow for a "foreign" aspect in Dilbert without using any specific location, in order to avoid a backlash by readers who may be from that region. Dilbert's company often uses Elbonia as a source of cheap labor and general outsourcing. However, these cost-savings attempts regularly backfire. For example, the computer code developed in Elbonia was only documented in Elbonian, and the debugging costs alone were more than what it would have cost to develop the entire program in-house.
Most of the Elbonians have beards, even the females and infants, and wear tall grey hats and black mittens. (Plop centers on a hairless, beardless child, a rarity in Elbonia.) Elbonians are commonly portrayed as idiotic and backward, and their technology is very outdated: "phones" are actually cans attached to the ends of strings and the means of "air transportation" (Air Elbonia) is flinging people from a giant slingshot (something Dilbert hates to do because he loses his luggage and gets head-deep into mud). In the TV series, "Air Elbonia" uses planes assembled from what looks like scrap metal and clapboard, and there are no runways, so the plane just lands in the mud. However, the Pointy-Haired Boss seems to approve of outsourcing programming or documentation tasks to them on a regular basis.
For many years the country has been mired in a civil war between the left- and right-handed Elbonians, although the war was mostly bloodless, as the Elbonians did not realize they were allowed to use weapons. Elbonia has also threatened its neighbor, Kneebonia, with nuclear weapons launched by slingshot.
Elbonia was also briefly engaged in a war with France, that erupted when Dilbert's company gave them the bid of launching a French spy satellite, which resulted in the disastrous slingshot launch of the satellite into the French Embassy in Elbonia. After a brief bombing campaign, France ended the war after realizing that there was nothing of value to bomb and the Elbonian GNP tripled when the citizens sold the bomb shrapnel as scrap metal. This temporary rise in wealth caused the Elbonians to try to instigate another war with France by standing in front of the newly rebuilt French Embassy and insulting French wine, which ultimately failed.
Elbonia's government is a dictatorship, run by a right-handed military strongman who strives to crush the lefties. Dogbert briefly deposed the President and made himself dictator, turning Elbonia into a tourist hotspot by making prostitution and gambling not only legal, but mandatory. He and Dilbert (who acted as his advisor) fled the palace when they mistook the Elbonians' coming to them bearing farm tools as an uprising — it turned out they were calling him to preside over a farm holiday. In fact, this was the protracted series during which the "jowly" boss was replaced by the Pointy-Haired Boss.
Some strips reference a "North Elbonia", which is still Communist. It appears to be loosely based on North Korea. North Elbonia was destroyed when they used a giant laser manufactured by Dilbert's employer; the manual had been made by Tina out of anger on how women in North Elbonia are mistreated (at least according to Dilbert).
The national bird of Elbonia is the Frisbee. The Elbonians refuse to do any business which is not corrupt, and in order to attract tourists Elbonia openly lies in its promotional videos, claiming to host five of the seven wonders of the world. When Dilbert's company won the bid to build a cell phone network for the Elbonians, the Elbonian government would not sign the contract until they were given plans for a nuclear weapon. Dilbert instead gave them plans for a giant toaster, and they were foiled by a lack of highly enriched bread.
Elbonia might be either a conscious or coincidental parallel to one of the venues in Al Capp's long-running strip Li'l Abner: a nation called Lower Slobovia (based on Siberia), whose citizens were perpetually seen in waist deep snow and ice.
|
|
|
|---|---|
| Characters: | Alice • Asok • Carol • Catbert • Dilbert • Dogbert • Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light • Pointy-Haired Boss • Ratbert • Wally • Minor characters |
| In other media: | Animated series • Books • Plop: The Hairless Elbonian |
| Terms: | Cow-orker • Imaginary productivity |
| Other: | Scott Adams • Dogbert's New Ruling Class • Elbonia • Dilberito |
