A nation must think before it acts.
Two muffins are sitting in an oven, baking. One muffin turns to the other and says: “Is it just me, or is it getting really hot in here?” The second muffin turns to the first and says: “Holy cow, a talking muffin!”
This joke is funny, the blogger Aaron M. Brown explains, because it commits a logical fallacy “and then immediately turns around and calls itself on it.” Ascribing qualities to an object that can’t possibly possess them is known as a “category error”—in this case the quality of talking belongs to the category of humans, not to the category of food. Conflating things from different categories can lead sometimes to witty wordplay, but also to sloppy analysis and confusion.