Every Monday (well, most of them) we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. This week’s choice is from 1987.

When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown famously claimed to have eliminated the boom and bust cycle. Then when he became Prime Minister a few years later he presided over the biggest economic bust since the Great Depression. We’re glad he got it wrong, because as financial cartoonists we’ve always been very grateful for boom and bust: the yin and yang of the business world. For the first half of each economic cycle we would be able to write jokes about bankers being bullish, getting big bonuses and buying flash cars; and then, when things inevitably went into reverse, we’d run cartoons about them being bearish, getting “donuts” and being terrified of the sack. And repeat ad infinitum.

On a couple of occasions we remember people suggesting to us that when the economy shifted from upswing to downturn that we should just repeat our old jokes from the previous bear market. “No one will notice”, they would reassure us. We realise they were trying to be helpful, but it was a bit dispiriting all the same. We like to believe that our readers have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the entire Alex joke canon and would pull us up immediately if we ever repeated a gag. But maybe it’s not possible to avoid repetition. Some humour theorists claim that there are only five or six basic jokes (they don’t seem to agree on the number). The long-serving business editor at the Telegraph Neil Collins would tell us, in his typically acerbic manner, that Alex only ever had “one joke”. He was our boss for 13 years, so, according to him, we did the same joke approximately 2,990 times.

That seems unlikely, but it’s true that once or twice we accidentally repeated an idea and only become aware of it in retrospect. When this happened we would console ourselves that it’s okay to plagiarise your own work. All artists have their themes, memes, tropes and leitmotifs. Taylor Swift has written about twenty five songs based round exactly the same chord progression. Occasionally we even did a joke in Alex that was a bit like someone else’s. There’s a scene in one of the Tintin books (“The Secret of the Unicorn”) which is similar to the phone box cartoon above. But maybe it’s just an example of one of those five (or is it six?) classic joke archetypes.

The change from rainy to fine weather in the two frames of this cartoon was unintentionally symbolic and prophetic. The strip ran on Monday, October 19th 1987. The previous Friday had seen Britain battered by the Great Storm, where hurricane-force winds wreaked devastation across Southern England. The storm had blown itself out by the time this cartoon appeared on the Monday, but a bigger disaster was brewing in financial markets. Global stock indices crashed (the Dow Jones dropped by 508 points - a blip by today’s standards, but the biggest fall on record back then), leading the day to be dubbed “Black Monday”. So ironically this cartoon ran exactly on the pivot point between boom and bust in the economic cycle. The changeover proved to be good news for us, because the hitherto-brash, all-conquering Yuppies we were writing about were suddenly shit-scared about their future, providing us with a fresh supply of new material.

Click here to read Alex’s history of the Crash of ’87.

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.