Ha ha ha.. ha ha ha... ha ha! *croak*

[LostOne]

(*note before commenting on my lame thread title try to imagine me saying it with Vizzini’s voice in The Princess Bride)

I was flipping through The Straight Dope and came across this intresting column (p207 of the paperback). In it Uncle Cece mentions a story where 1,000 people died of a mass fit of laughter…

:eek:

I had to look this one up. First thing I found was this thread. To quote from the site given:

Consider the bizarre events of the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika. What began as an isolated fit of laughter (and sometimes crying) in a group of 12- to 18-year-old schoolgirls rapidly rose to epidemic proportions. Contagious laughter propagated from one individual to the next, eventually infecting adjacent communities. The epidemic was so severe that it required the closing of schools. It lasted for six months.

The jist I get from this is ‘gee some kids thought something was funny and everybody got caught up in it’. To me this is unacceptable. Most of the sites I googled were simliar, some went on to say it was unexplained but none seemed to doubt it was just normal ole’ laughter. I mean… I’ve experienced contagious laughter… but 1,000 people for six months to the point of death?

Eventually I ran into this site which seemed to make a bit more sense. The relevent bits:

It started among young girls who erupted in fits of laughter that did not stop, spread to neighboring communities, and became so severe that schools were forced to close. The epidemic persisted for almost six months and may not have been psychological—at least not entirely—because victims had symptoms such as fever and headache.

The same site also mentions laughter can be caused by certain diseases/brain disorders but I tend to think saying 1,000 people had that same problem is farfetched. Personally I’m looking at that last line.

So… finally… my question. What sort of things could cause 6 months of unprovoked laughter? Could it be the people of Tanganyika are just suspectable to a certain disorder? Maybe there is something more sisister here (chemical spill?). To sum it up… ‘wtf?!?’

[Devil_s_Advocate]

Note that Cecil doesn’t say the 1,000 people died, just that the laughing fit lasted for several days. I haven’t looked at the sites you linked, but maybe they don’t refer to actual deaths either. Also, I’m guessing that in the six-month epidemic, the same people didn’t laugh for six months straight, but rather the laughter spread from person to person possibly revisiting a given person more than once.

Still, pretty bizarre, huh?