I was watching SCTV clips of Martin Short last night, and started wondering: If a person laughs so hard that their diaphragm cramps up, and can’t flex/release or expand/contract, how would the person breathe? Are there supplemental muscles that kick in?
Being somewhat, or totally, physiologically/anatomically ignorant, I don’t know how this works.
I think under such circumstances it would be likely that you would start breathing when you passed out. Not certain, mind you.
The intercostal muscles are used. You can suffer a herniated diaphragm yet continue to respire.
Wikipedia has a list of people who allegedly died from laughter:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_laughter
A lot of them are from antiquity though so probably should be taken with a grain of salt.
Sorry, here is the actual list:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_from_laughter