This is a simple set of challenges for you in assessing and sorting visual cliches. Anyone can do it. Think of a witch, a ghost, Lady Godiva. What are the recognisable attributes of the character? What is the basic location? What are the basic rules?

Choose a cartoon. And ask yourself if the cartoonist has added anything new, is there anything revealed about the story that has long been hidden? Is it FUNNY? Is the caption exact, formulaic, or excessive in order to conceal a poverty of thought? It can be a constructive exercise. Much of Saul Steinberg's genius lies in his refashioning of graphic modes and cliches.

If you can see nothing that hasn't been used in the past then you are in the presence of the pictorial cliche (see the Emett drawing beneath). See also Donald McKee's equivalent listing of the dreary formulae of political cartoons - the success of a policy - the beastly behaviour of the enemy - the transition from the Old Year (or policy) to the New.

But don't get too cross. An artist has to earn a living. We are all capable of mediocrity.There may be a puckish spirit at work, if only you looked HARD.Several of the captions have an unusual power, "Why should I damp your Shammy?" being my favourite.

These examples are evidence of the enduring attraction of shipwrecked souls on the desert island, how they had survived the life on a raft and how they will respond to the solitary life without modern amenities. Significantly the survivors are almost unformly pairings of men and women. The reader's imagination is meant to flare with the thought of all moral codes suspended.

The island is for pictorial reasons (and the space allocated on the page) often restricted to a small disk of land with a palm tree growing in the middle. There is much fun to be had drawing ragged trousers and skimpy revealing shifts for the ladies. Faced with such austerities, the horizon is often given the focus as the source of deliverence, or the arrival of horny sailors. The whole concept is one of paring the pictorial propositions down to the minimum, knowing that the discerning audience will not demand verisimilitude. The sexual frisson is usually quite enough to be getting along with. How to draw receptivity?

In the Entertainment section are the most recognisable of the pictorial schemata, reassuring even the most nervous reader - that all was right with the world - that knife throwers missed, that the Tower of Pisa still leaned, that drunks held rubber cigarettes and had tousled hair.

In the post-war period, whenever British cartoonists were stumped for an idea, their default was the artist's studio with nude models, or the sculptor's studio with Moore/Hepworth lumps with holes. The Bohemian was so easy to draw - all beard and sweater.

Fairs and Fetes. In terms of familiar sexual imagery, the Tunnel of Love seldom failed, any offending grappling confined to the spaces behind the Tunnel Opening. A variant was of course The Hall of Mirrors. Speak your Weight machines, Ring the Bell machines and Hoopla stalls also feature.

The eager harnessing of dumb creatures to your comic invention seldom produced work of excellence. It served rather to produce easy, quick ideas, particularly in Political cartooning. An example might very well be the Parrot which is given more than its fair share of participation (see Henry Stacy Marks' entire career).

Sexual references are of course oblique, so I have included reference to Mermaids, some of which are positively indecent in their behaviour. Aitchison's drawing above of the Mermaid learning to swim has a number of possible rude interpretations. The depiction of Cavemen gives an instant excuse for the brutish behaviour against women and bone headed refusal to countenance the future.

Given the male readership of many of the humour magazine it is not surprising that the treatment of Big Game Hunting features large, seldom on the Veldt, more but usually among the taxidermic remains.

Now you have reached the core of it all. I suspect that the eager cartoonist may start his/her day with reflections on the humour of the Professions. or perhaps a cheap slap at our 'Foreign Friends'. All effective pornography must identify the narrative milieu with clear indications of uniforms, which is why chefs, policemen and firemen have sex while retaining their hats. Similarly, the cartoon's humorous proposition must leave nothing to the imagination. The surgery must make it clear whether the dominant force is an MD, a psychiatrist, an optician or a dentist. As Emett has identified, the diploma on the wall tells all, if in a heavy handed way.

The identification of nationality provides us with simple fare, and even simpler jokes, the Mexican's hat, the Australian's deployment of corks, the Scotsman's kilt, the American's stetson. The challenge comes with the depiction of Belgians, New Zealanders and Serbians. Aliens from Outer Space are easily drawn as little chaps with cranial aerials before Roswell, or as sloe eyed whippets threafter. The correspondence between life and art in drawing the Flying Saucer tends to help undermine the credibility of witness sitings. It is clear the slack jawed truck driver had seen in the sky what was first seen in his book of saucy cartoons.

Given the income generating attractions of the smutty cartoon, artists were constantly storing up potential subject matter. There could be little emphasis on the anatomical can be little treament in the mass circulation magazines of the day. Instead the field is dominated by the Mythic (Adam and Eve, Samson and Delilah) and the Situational (Newly Wed, Toff and Tart, Idle Fantasies). There was too much to include so I am trying to be highly selective here - no, really.

The attraction of the burglar and his doings to the artist is mystifying. Is it perhaps the flat cap, the Badger style mask and the cloth bag over the shoulder (SWAG) that so clearly identifies his calling. Much has been made of the British fear of threats to property.

The locale might change and involve dealing with stuffy managers in a bank (striped suit, with bristling outrage), entrance into someone else's home (delicate sampling of provisions) or indeed, revelations of the burglar's own home life (see Gilbert and Sullivan, When a Felon's not engaged in his Employment from Pirates of Penzance.

It is indicateive of an artist's dedication to the cult of Easy Viewing that, despite horrific accounts of tuorture in prison, prisoners are still strung up in their cells in the cause of comedy.

DREAMS AND SLEEP

DREAMS

DREAMS

TRANQUILISED

DREAMS

DREAMS AND SLEEP

FANTASY

FANTASY

DREAMS

This is a fascinating option, with the pictorial challenge of clearly differentiated zones of the sleeping forms, and the dream forms. I include here two standard responses of little consequence that might challenge Goya's The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters.

see also DREAMS AND FANTASIES

I consider this the most depressing and limp of all the catgories because it seems to encompass all the minor prejudices among which I grew up in Watford. My Mother wasn't allowed to drive the Family Car because 'she had too much imagination', a term by which my Father ensured he was the only driver. I didn't encounter the ritual humiliation of Family Servants or their attempts to undermine their employers, but it was part of the values among which I was nurtured. I shall of course expand this section but it is with a heavy heart.

EMETT, THE PALACE OF CULTURE, Punch 1951- a compilation like no other, the knowing iconography of the true professional - every detail is telling.

DONALD MCKEE, CARTOONS TO THE TRADE a brilliant anthology of the tired old formulae.....

see also CLICHE