Scott Adams has died. Graham Kerr, as of this writing, is still alive.
It won't surprise me if you don't recognize either name. Neither has been famous for a long time.
As far as I know, they never met.
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Graham Victor Kerr was born on January 22, 1934 in Brondesbury, North London. His Scottish parents ran hotels. In one of his books, he said, "My name is pronounced 'care' -- not 'cur,' as in the case of Bill Kerr; and not 'car," as in the case of Deborah Kerr." (Bill Kerr was an Australian actor, and Deborah Kerr a Scottish actress.)
He grew up in East Sussex, in the south of England, and learned to cook while serving in the British Army's Army Catering Corps. Upon his discharge, with the rank of Lieutenant, he went into the family business, managing hotels. He moved to New Zealand, and hosted a television show there, winning an award as "Personality of the Year." He was brought over to Australia, and became a star there.
In 1968, he moved to Canada, with a show on CJOH-Channel 13, a CTV show in the national capital of Ottawa. It was named The Galloping Gourmet, for the book he and wine expert Len Evans had recently written. The show was produced by Graham's wife, the former Treena Van Doorne.
The nickname was the result of a 35-day worldwide trek to the finest restaurants around the globe. The show was taped in front of a live audience. The title was echoed in the opening of each episode, where Kerr entered the stage area by running in and leaping over a chair in the dining room set, a stunt conceived by Treena. Many episodes featured a prerecorded segment with Kerr in a part of the world wherein that episode's dish originated.
The foods he presented were not exactly healthy: Like PBS host Julia Child, he used liberal amounts of butter, cream, fat and wine. He even drank the wine during his demonstrations. PBS picked the show up, and it was a hit all over North America.
The show came to an end in 1972, after the Kerrs were hurt in a car crash, and needed time to recover. Treena later suffered from tuberculosis, after a misdiagnosis of lung cancer. These setbacks convinced both of them to get religion in 1975.
Shortly thereafter, his new show, Take Kerr, debuted, but his newfound faith changed things. The hymn "This Is the Day the Lord Has Made" became his theme song, he quoted Scripture, and switched to healthier recipes, including no more wine. He later confessed that he blamed himself for a part in America's obesity epidemic, and apologized for his former on-air habits of slightly naughty language and drinking. People realized the new Graham Kerr wasn't so funny without the naughtiness, and the show did poorly, and was canceled.
He bided his time, and allowed the audience to catch up with him, as the 1980s were a more conservative decade in his target countries: America elected Ronald Reagan, Canada elected Brian Mulroney, and Britain elected Margaret Thatcher. Later shows such as The Graham Kerr Show and Graham Kerr's Kitchen did better than Take Kerr, making him something of an elder statesman. He lightened up a little, and stopped objecting to old episodes of The Galloping Gourmet appearing on cable networks like The Food Network. Treena passed away in 2015. Graham remarried in 2024, and lives in the suburbs of Seattle. If he makes it to January 22, he will be 92 years old.
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Scott Raymond Adams was born on June 8, 1957 in Windham, Greene County, in the Catskill Mountains of the Hudson Valley of New York State. He was a fan of the comic strip Peanuts, but was also interested in economics, and got a degree in that subject from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. He went west, and earned a Masters of Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley.
(Anybody old enough to be shocked that a Trump fan went to that famously leftist school should be reminded that it's not as leftist as it was in the 1960s.)
He rose to management at Pacific Bell, but saw how inefficient the corporate world could be. On April 16, 1989, while still working there, he launched his comic strip Dilbert with United Media. Dilbert was an "office drone," resembling comedian Drew Carey, except that, like comic strip character Little Orphan Annie, he had no eyeballs (though, unlike Annie, he wore glasses). A distinguishing feature was Dilbert's turned-up tie.
By 1995, he was successful enough that he was able to leave Pac Bell and write the strip full-time. That same year, he developed what became the title of his first book, The Dilbert Principle: Companies tend to promote incompetent employees to management, to minimize their ability to harm productivity. The Dilbert Principle is inspired by the Peter Principle, which is that employees are promoted based on success until they attain their "level of incompetence," and are no longer successful. UPN ran an animated Dilbert series in the 1999-2000 and 2000-01 TV seasons.
Liberals loved Dilbert, because most of them hated their bosses and jobs, too. That's why it seemed to be such a betrayal when Adams seemed to turn right: He endorsed Mitt Romney for President in 2012, and Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. It was flabbergasting: How the hell could the guy who wrote Dilbert endorse for President two of the biggest asshole businessmen in American history?
It got worse. In 2016, he said that Hillary Clinton's candidacy for President would "lower the status of men in America." In 2020, he said that if Joe Biden won, "Republicans would be hunted." Biden won, and Republicans were not hunted. On February 22, 2023, on his podcast Real Coffee with Scott Adams, he described black people as a "hate group," and said, "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people; just get the fuck away." Dilbert was canceled 32 days later, on March 26, 2023.
He married and divorced twice, with each wife bringing 2 children to the marriage, but he had no biological children.
On May 19, 2025, he announced on his podcast that he had prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, and that he didn't think he had long to live. He had tried taking ivermectin, one of the drugs that Trump had recommended to prevent COVID in 2020, which had failed completely in that regard, and Adams said that it failed to help his cancer, too. He tried a more proven treatment, and it reduced his pain significantly, but by the end of 2025, the cancer had spread to his spine, and he was paralyzed.
He also claimed that, after years of atheism and mockery of religion, he had become a born-again Christian. It did not help him in life as much as it helped Graham and Treena Kerr, as he died today, January 13, 2026, at the age of 68, in the Bay Area community of Pleasanton, California. Whether his conversion has helped him in death, I am, as yet, in no position to know.
The reaction online to his death was not kind. Many people said that he had sold his soul to Trump and the MAGA movement, and that they had no sympathy for him.
Having gone through a lot of pain in my life -- thankfully, none of it due to cancer so far -- I do have some sympathy for him. But, while he was still healthy, I would have liked to have asked him, "What the hell is the matter with you? You know what this guy is like. How can you still support him?"
Graham Kerr got religion, changed because of it, was criticized for that, and had the good grace to step back from the public eye for a while, and not make a nuisance of himself.
Scott Adams did not.
Graham Kerr is still alive, and is still fondly remembered.
Scott Adams is no longer the former, and is unlikely to become the latter.
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