Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers.

Alex cartoons don’t always appeal to everyone. Perhaps that’s because our satirical remit is fairly narrow: we tend to mock bankers, brokers, traders and fund managers (it’s a dirty job, but somebody has got to do it). So it’s nice that reader Gus MacIver has chosen this joke, which goes off-piste and mocks lawyers instead (sometimes we’ve even gone so far as to have a pop at accountants too).

Though we’ve done 65 cartoons about lawyers in Alex over the years, we only really have two generic jokes about them in our repertoire. This is one of them: about how lawyers are obsessed with billing for their time. The other joke is about them being insufferably pedantic. So, lawyers are either heartless or boring. Or both. A quick trawl through lawyer jokes on the internet tells us that these are fairly well-documented character traits in the legal profession worldwide.

Our reader Gus informs us that he is not a lawyer himself, but that he used cartoons like this one to try to dissuade his son from becoming one. He failed… It’s actually possible that Alex cartoons actively encouraged the son in his career choice. We have met quite a few young bankers at book signings over the years who have told us that they were motivated to go the City by reading our cartoons (what?! We were trying to put you off, you fools..). Even more worryingly, we have also heard from several people who say they have named their son “Alex" after our character (though we’ve never heard of anyone calling their child “Clive”). This is evidence of how satire is a scattergun weapon, which can easily backfire.

Why do we laugh at lawyer jokes? Well, it depends what theory of humour you subscribe to. The French philosopher Henri Bergson in his “Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” says that we laugh at our fellow humans when they display rigid, automata-like behaviour. This would account for the jokes about lawyers being pedantic.

As for the other joke - that lawyers are heartless and preoccupied with their fees - this would be explained by a different, and perhaps more persuasive, theory of humour: that we laugh at things that we are frightened of. We laugh at political jokes because it is a scary thought that our nation’s leaders might be incompetent or corrupt. We laugh (hopefully) at jokes in the Alex cartoon about bankers because it alarms us to think that the financial professionals who are in charge of our pensions and savings (and ultimately the economy) might be self-serving idiots. And, as for lawyers, they are the people who supposedly ensure that the rule of law is correctly implemented in our society, and we wouldn’t want to believe that they are irresponsible and insensitive. Satire doesn’t actually change the world, it just gives us the illusory satisfaction of feeling morally superior to the people who control our lives.

This cartoon comes from a storyline in 1993 when Rupert was having one of his frequent brushes with the authorities over his financial dealings. Of course there is the possibility that he staged the collapse outside his lawyer’s office as a ruse to feign illness to get himself a more lenient sentence. Not that this would prevent his lawyer from billing him for those extra minutes.

PS Gus McIver has just emailed us to inform us that his errant son last week resigned from his Magic Circle law firm to go travelling. So, a belated victory for satire … He goes on to mention that his son is called Alex. Now that’s a coincidence too far.

Click on the cartoon above to see it in its original 1990s context.

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.