Hours after Kennedy was shot, Lenny Bruce walked on stage in a New York nightclub. The audience eagerly awaited his opening line. “Wow,” he whistled. “Vaughn Meader's screwed.” Brilliant, and savagely accurate.

Meader was the leading Kennedy impersonator of the day, and his act never recovered. When Bush finally comes to shove in January, and the White House is repossessed (an ironic echo of the sub-prime crisis), satire itself will enter a brief recession.

For eight years George W. Bush has been many a comedian and cartoonist's wet dream, an easy target, a sitting duck. You're big if the world knows you by your first name (Elton, Madonna, Osama); bigger still if an initial will suffice. “W”. “Dubya”; from the moment Clinton staffers allegedly removed the letter w from the White House typewriters, Bush was the butt of the joke. He played the part of the imbecile brilliantly: just when you thought it couldn't get any better, it didn't.

As Steve Martin said, some people have a way with words, while others have not way. Bush's pronouncements were an embarrassment of glitches. There were the words - “nucular” instead of “nuclear”, “vulcanise” for “Balkanise” - and the Bush phrases (“I know how hard it is to put food on your family”; and “Our enemies ... never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we”). Others were perhaps apocryphal (“The trouble with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur”). It was an easy style to parody, the set-ups and pay-offs a comedian's stock-in-trade (“I have a message for those suicide bombers: we're gonna find you”).

Visually, he was the full package: the awkward body language, the elbows sticking out as he walked, as if he was carrying two sheep under his arms (“I come from Texas. I'd look stupid carrying one”). There were the features. The simian face, so beautifully caricatured by Gerald Scarfe and The Guardian's Steve Bell - all sticking-out ears, mad eyes and chimpanzee mouth, occasionally extended into a windsock pout. The contrast between a position of global power and the evident confusion behind those eyes gave him an air of permanent irony. Is this guy for real? Where does the original end and the parody begin? That upside-down book, those binoculars with lens-caps on: real or fake?

Then there was his clumsiness - his propensity for embarrassing entanglement with anything from bicycles to pretzels to Middle Eastern countries.

Bush is apparently disarmingly funny: a friend from his oil-trading days told me that he would answer the phone to irate investors wondering where their oil was with a cheery “Dryhole Bush here!” The self-deprecation is appropriate. As Dame Edna said to Jeffrey Archer: “If you can't laugh at yourself, you're missing out on the joke of the century.”

The Dubya factor

It seems fair to suggest that the world won't miss George W. Bush all that much when he's gone. But looking back at some of the brilliant cartoons that he has inspired - some of my favourites are reprinted here today - brings home just what a loss he is to cartoonists.

For the past eight years Dubya has been one of the richest political subjects I have known. It's not that he's stupid - you can't be stupid and get to be the American president - it's more that he's dumb. And he looked the part, too.

Whether it was his verbal gaffes, choking on a pretzel, trying to open a false door (twice, so he had two goes at looking like a dumbass) or more

profound calamities such as invading Iraq, Bush had a huge capacity for disaster. Such things couldn't have happened on such a scale to someone who had all his wits about him.

What made him a gift to all cartoonists was that his physical appearance complements this dumbness: you can see that on page 4 in Martin Rowson's terrific drawing transforming Bush into a helicopter (those close-set eyes, those jutting ears) or Steve Brodner, again overleaf, using Bush's features to imbue Mickey Mouse with menace. Gerald Scarfe's drawings of Bush, top right, have become scarier and scarier: he shows Bush as the ultimate simian creature, usually in combat fatigues.

In the US, Michael Ramirez is a cartoonist I greatly admire despite his politics; his drawings are fantastic. He's a Bush supporter, and this drawing (far right) of the President in the Alamo is one of only a few of Bush that he seems to have done. Maybe that's because it is incredibly difficult to portray Bush in a positive way.

A good example of his everyday ineptitude making good material is Chris Riddell's drawing on page 4 of the President being flushed down the pan - it's from 2005, during a UN summit, when a photographer managed to capture a note that Bush had passed to Condoleezza Rice. It read: “I think I may need a bathroom break? Is this possible?”

The dilemma that comes with being a political cartoonist is that the more flawed and horrendous your subjects are, the better it is for you - and the worse it is for the world. You're feeding off disaster. And Bush has been a disaster.

Peter Brookes

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