Many of us have witnessed moments whose implicit character cause that shall-be-nameless muscle that inhibits spontaneous urination to loosen suddenly in the grip of manic hilarity. One of my familiar favorites is when a common housecat becomes so worked up that it begins to experience what is, effectively, a sequence of recursively-derived self-scaring events that proceed in an unstoppable cascade until they culminate in some form of feline terror-orgasm.

Surely all of this is inherently inexplicable to the cat, who is clearly at once their cause and their victim. But the facial expressions of cats thus entangled, and the peculiarly hilarious effect of the active prosecution of such impossible goals as escaping their own tail, or causing themselves to levitate (because surfaces themselves have transformed into unintelligible visual nonsense?) is truly one of nature’s most irresistible spectacles. The sheer unpredictable chaos that ensues when a cat has thoroughly spooked itself is as hilarious as it is medicinal.