Contagious Laughter in Tanganyika

[bughunter]

I just came across a reference to a bizarre episode of contagious laughter in Tanganyika in 1962 that lasted months and spread from community to community.

Looking for more info, I was soon frustrated by the fact that every mention of this event on the web was a paraphrasing or direct plagarism of Robert Provine’s 1996 American Scientist article on laughter.

Do any Dopers out there have a line on more original info, such as field notes, first hand accounts, photographs or (wonder of wonders) video?

And as an armchair anthropologist, I would be entertained by any analysis of how or why such a thing could happen.

[schief2]

Perhaps you would be interested in Provine’s book, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. I haven’t read it, but it apparently covers this incident in some greater detail. Other than that, all I’ve found is an excerpt from a New York Times review of the book, which contains this passage:

He describes an epidemic of uncontrollable laughter that afflicted more than 1,000 people in Tanganyika from 1962 to 1964; individual laughter attacks lasted from minutes to hours. The neurological mechanisms that produced these attacks are not fully understood.

[Bob_Scene]

Here’s a reference I found.

Rankin, A. M., and P. J. Philip. 1963. An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba District of Tanganyika. Central African Journal of Medicine 9:167-170.

[Mangetout]

I’ve been involved in a small-scale version of this.

I was on holiday with a few friends and was woken up in the middle of the night by loud laughter from one of the other bedrooms; it went on a long time and eventually, annoyed, I went to investigate.

I found three of my friends (who were sharing a bedroom) literally rolling about the floor laughing; I couldn’t get any of them to stop or even explain in more than a few gasped words like “can’t stop”
This made me laugh myself, but once I’d started, I couldn’t stop and before long, I was in the same predicament; others who came to investigate suffered the same problem, eventually there were (IIRC) eight people in the room in total collapse through laughter.
It continued for at least three hours and only stopped when some of use made the conscious effort to crawl away to separate places to recover.

It was, on the whole, a pleasant experience, when we did finally get back to bed, nobody woke up until early the next afternoon. My throat, ribs, stomach and back were very sore for the next 24 hours or so.

We weren’t able to ascertain the exact cause of the laughter, but we think it started when one or more of the people sharing the room laughed out loud in their sleep.

[bibliophage]

Cecil makes brief mention of the episode in Is it possible for someone to be tickled to death?

Epidemics of laughing, a type of mass hysteria, have been noted since the Middle Ages, and similar episodes are occasionally reported in the medical literature today. For instance, 1,000 people in Tanganyika suffered a mass laughing fit lasting several days in 1963.

Most of the victims of laughing fits recover. But some die from a combination of starvation and exhaustion. You can’t eat or sleep while laughing, and we all know if you try to drink it just sprays out your nose.