To me, at least, the difference between what Scott Adams is doing and a good-faith definition of "punching up" is that he's trivializing genuine issues faced by marginalized people, and trying to make it all about him (the way most things have been about well-off white men for so much of Western history).
I think that if you really wanted to make a workplace comic that skewers HR departments' often hamfisted attempts to promote diversity (which is often because they themselves don't really care about it, and have just been given a mandate), you need to center the people with the real issues, rather than the ones who are being mildly inconvenienced by it.
Have a trans employee complaining that HR is happy to jump down people's throats for accidental misgendering, but still hasn't actually processed their name change paperwork and informed IT, so the intranet is still deadnaming them.
Have an employee of color upset that they've plastered black, Hispanic, and Asian people all over the company's website, but he's just gotten passed up for promotion for the third time to a white guy who worked there less than a year and who does nothing but kibitz all day.
Have a Jewish employee angry that the company has branded kippahs that they give out alongside their other swag, but won't give the Jewish High Holidays off as paid holidays.
In general, play up the empty tokenism, while emphasizing what's really important. (Making it also funny is left as an exercise for the reader; I don't claim to be a comic.)
I think that if you really wanted to make a workplace comic that skewers HR departments' often hamfisted attempts to promote diversity (which is often because they themselves don't really care about it, and have just been given a mandate), you need to center the people with the real issues, rather than the ones who are being mildly inconvenienced by it.
Have a trans employee complaining that HR is happy to jump down people's throats for accidental misgendering, but still hasn't actually processed their name change paperwork and informed IT, so the intranet is still deadnaming them.
Have an employee of color upset that they've plastered black, Hispanic, and Asian people all over the company's website, but he's just gotten passed up for promotion for the third time to a white guy who worked there less than a year and who does nothing but kibitz all day.
Have a Jewish employee angry that the company has branded kippahs that they give out alongside their other swag, but won't give the Jewish High Holidays off as paid holidays.
In general, play up the empty tokenism, while emphasizing what's really important. (Making it also funny is left as an exercise for the reader; I don't claim to be a comic.)