Credit: Dangerous Minds

Laughing is a strange old thing, which lies in a strange hinterland between a form of communication and a gut reaction. It’s as uncontrollable as a sneeze, yet something we all do to signify compliance with someone.

When you think about it, it’s the reason why so many insecure people are also the first to make a joke. Or so I’ve been told, I’m the least insecure person you’ll ever meet, and I want the names, addresses and next of kin of anyone who’s told you differently. It’s a way of, for lack of a better way of putting it, controlling people, and making people socially subservient. After all, laughter is a panic reaction at its core. It’s what we do when something suddenly makes sense to us, and we have to express that jolt of surprise in an acceptable manner.

In history, nowhere has laughter felt more like a panic response than in Tanzania in 1962, then known as Tanganyika.

On January 30th, three pupils at a mission-run boarding school for girls started to laugh. Nothing out of the ordinary, obviously, except that this laughter didn’t stop. There was nothing any of the teachers could do, no amount of disciplining, quiet time or berating could stop this uncontrollable outpouring of mirth from the three girls.

Now, this is clearly worrying behaviour, but it would at least be controllable. The trouble comes from considering the one thing you can count on laughter to do, which is spread. There were 159 pupils enrolled at this school, and at the phenomenon’s peak, 95 of its students were affected with uncontrollable laughter. The average amount of time these symptoms lasted was an entire week, with some poor souls being completely stricken with this inexplicable condition for over a fortnight.

This led to the school being closed in March and staying shut for nearly two months before opening back up at the end of May. All seemed to be well until the phenomenon came back, affecting 57 more pupils before doing the unthinkable, and spreading out of the school and into the nearby towns.

What caused this laughter epidemic?

The strange part was that no adult was ever affected with this laughter epidemic. While it ran through the student population of the school like a knife through butter the teaching staff weren’t affected. When the plague spread into the surrounding towns in the summertime, it still mostly affected the youngest members of its population, mainly girls and young women. It even found its way into another school, the Ramashenye Girls’ Middle School, where it affected 48 pupils.

This was accompanied by another outbreak at the original school it emanated from and both had to close over the summer months. Those were just two of the 14 total schools that had to temporarily close that year as a direct result of this laughter epidemic. One that saw over a thousand people effected by it. The truly strange part of all this is that to this day, no-one has any idea how it happened. There are theories, but no generally accepted route cause.

The closes anyone has come to finding the root of this laughter epidemic were people like sociologist Robert Bartholomew, psychiatrist Simon Wessely and linguist Christian F Hempelmann. Each of them theorised that, since this was an epidemic that mainly effected girls and young women, this was a response to the strict conservatism that these people lived under. A response that came from not being given the tools to express or even process the fear and stress they felt from these societal pressures.

Remarkably, there have also been instances of similar outbreaks in South Africa, Kosovo and Afghanistan. While they are separated by continents, they are all places where young people live are under particular scrutiny from adults without being given any tools to deal with it. In this case, laughter isn’t the best medicine; it’s the only thing you can do.

After all, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry, right?