I write humorous fantasy so tropes, cliches and stereotypes are my bread and butter. To some degree genres can be viewed as a collection of tropes. Even the books that try to be wholly original are still likely following pretty close to a classic story archetype. Things become tropes because they work really easily together.

I love that there are so many familiar tropes in fantasy. Makes my job a lot easier. Many of the cliches and stereotypes of fantasy are so ingrained that they've bled over to non-fantasy audiences. Fire-breathing dragons, knights in shining armor, the evil witch deep within the wood--we're all raised on this stuff. We start out with Grimm's Fairy Tales rather than Richard Scarry's Great Big Book of Murder.

I try to find the humor in tropes by applying real-world practicalities to them. But, at the same time, this requires doing something new with them. I think that is what most readers want an author to do. It's genre fiction; readers expect the tropes but they also expect you to make the tropes new.