I sometimes worry that I seem to be smarter and more inventive when I'm half asleep, as though being conscious somehow interferes with the operation of my brain. I mean, I know that all sorts of stuff can bubble up from your subconscious in the netherland between waking and sleeping, stuff that you weren't even aware of that surprises you with its intellectual shortcuts, poetry and deftness. But I'm talking about stuff orders of magnitude away from the lumpen, plodding activity my mind seems capable of when fully awake.
Case in point. Yesterday I watched the new Superman animated movie, Doomsday. Aside from the fact that the PG-13 rating seems to have been used purely to justify some gratuitous violence - "SEE! Superman coughing up a stomachful of blood! WATCH! As more blood drips from the Toyman's flattened corpse! REVEL! In the kind of child endangerment they never let us get away with in the 90s!" - it's really rather good.
Sue wasn't remotely interested. This is disappointing to me, since one of my joys is sharing the excitement of watching cheesy SF, or reading cheesy comics, with her. Indeed, instead of watching Doomsday last night, we struggled through five episodes of 'The Armageddon Factor', the highlight of which was Sue's gasp of disbelief at K9 Turning Evil.
Floating only in the neighbourhood of consciousness this morning, I recalled watching an old Justice League ep, "Comfort and Joy'. with her. She'd enjoyed the fact that one of the Flash's enemies, the Ultra-Humanite, had used the word 'jejune'. This is funny on several levels. First, the Ultra-Humanite is a large, albino gorilla with an outsized brain. It's well established that monkeys doing human things is funny - lorry-loads of tea have been sold on that very principle - so making them big monkeys with brain cancer is even funnier. Secondly, the Ultra-Humanite is a comic-book baddie with refined sensibilities - the kind of evil genius who takes a child's toy called 'DJ Rubber Duckie' and reprograms it to tell the story of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker.
You'll find the 'jejune' moment at about 04:53 in this:
Most importantly, however, 'jejune' is funny because it's being used in a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, and because the writer, Paul Dini, knows that we'll find it funny because it's in a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, and because he knows that we know that as well and, what's more, that to boot. And so on. It's an infinite "I know, he knows" regressive loop.
Although, crucially, it's not actually a loop, because each circuit depends upon the previous circuit for its humour value. It's actually a never-ending conceptual spiral, spinning down into increasingly abstract humour until our minds simply cannot keep track of it anymore and we are left with no option but to laugh. Or, under similar but less amusing circumstances, scream.

MC Escher, known for his depictions of 'impossible hair'
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But we don't actually go through that mental process, or 'decide' to laugh. It occurs to me that laughter might be an instinctive reaction to hovering on the precipice above such a spiral. we instantly recognise the kind of infinite loop out minds could be caught in were we actually to consider the implications of the use of 'jejune' in that context and so, almost as a self-defence mechanism, we laugh. It distracts us, diverts us, preventing us from going down a path with no logical end. It's a short-cut to sanity.
Which is where we come back to one of my pet hobbyhorses, the Cogito. I've heard it described as 'self-fulfilling', a tautology logically incapable of revealing anything. But I contend that, like 'jejune', it's a hall of mirrors: an infinitely regressing reflection of one's consciousness, with the value of each cycle dependent upon the cycle before it. In that sense, it is less a syllogism than a mantra, something that not only proves the existence of the individual, but can be used to express the nature of that existence and thereby, hopefully, encourage people to understand it.
You might not actually find the Cogito funny, of course. But I'm sure it makes people scream from time to time.