JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This hour we are looking at laugh ...

ROBERT: Wait.

JAD: What was that?

ROBERT PROVINE: That's ... Okay, here we have the laugh box.

ROBERT: That's a strange little device that Robert Provine from University of Maryland played. Remember him from the previous section?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: He played it to me, and he has a notion about this.

ROBERT PROVINE: Yeah so basically you just need laughter to cause laughter.

ROBERT: The notion here is you don't need a joke to start the laugh, all you need is a laugh.

ROBERT PROVINE: You can throw the joke away, laughter causes laughter.

ROBERT: No you can't get a laugh going from nothing. You have to have something.

ROBERT PROVINE: Actually you can.

ROBERT: He said, "I'll prove it to you." He showed me a video tape.

ROBERT PROVINE: This was in the mall.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Excuse me, we're doing a study on laughter. Is laughter a good thing?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Absolutely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Do you laugh a lot?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: I laugh every day. I make my wife laugh all the time. She's laughing already.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: What do you do that makes him laugh?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Trip. [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Spills a lot of things.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: One other thing, we have a piece of apparatus here. You push the button for this.]

[canned laughter]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Why were you laughing?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: I don't know! [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Did anyone tell a joke?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: No.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Did anyone do anything funny?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: No.]

[canned laughter]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: [laughs]]

ROBERT: It was true. Provine is absolutely correct about this. What we're doing here is something that's very contagious.

JAD: All right well while we're on the subject of contagious laughter I've got a story to tell you. It's a good one too.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Now imagine—you with me?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Okay, imagine 1962 ...

ROBERT: Where would I go? I was just sitting here.

JAD: Oh just your attention, I mean.

ROBERT: Oh yes.

JAD: 1962, rural village of Kashasha Tanzania. Girls boarding school.

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Girl is sitting in class.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: She begins to laugh. The girl next to her, maybe to her left, hears her laugh and she begins to laugh. Across the classroom a third girl joins in. The teacher gets upset, but it's too late. Soon four girls, then eight, the entire class has begun to laugh and then cry, and then laugh and then cry.

ROBERT: At what?

JAD: Just because. I don't know.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Anyhow, a girl outside at that moment walking down the hall imagine she hears the laughter from the classroom. She starts to laugh and as she walks and laughs her laughter goes into other classrooms and soon the whole school is doing this laughing, crying, laughing, crying. Teachers cannot control these girls, and they try to. The girls get violent.

ROBERT: They get violent?

JAD: Yep. The principal then has no choice, he's got to close the school. They open the school a week later, and it happens again, so they close the school a second time. Meanwhile, the girls who started all this they go back to their villages many, many miles away and this thing, whatever it is, spreads up and down the coast of Lake Victoria.

ROBERT: You mean people in the villages start to laugh?

JAD: Yep. In one village 217 people start to laugh, and cry. A second boarding school has to shut down, and no one knows why. A team of doctors, some British doctors in the area, they hop in a land rover, and they rush out to investigate this strange phenomenon. This is what they write.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The Central African Journal of Medicine. Volume nine, number 5, May 1963. The disease commenced on the 13th of January 1962. The mission run girls middle school was ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The onset was sudden with attacks of laughing and crying lasting for a few minutes to a few hours.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: After a maximum of 16 days, followed by respite, and then a recurrence.]

JAD: In the report there is an account of a 52 year old man who saw some people afflicted with this sickness.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: And soon after returning to his hut he felt something telling him to laugh and cry and shout. This he continued to do for most of the night. No fatal cases have been reported.]

ROBERT: This is very—what? Is this true?

JAD: Yeah. I mean—well, okay, we wondered.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: So we sent our producer Ellen Horne, 40-some odd years after the fact to see what she could find.

ELLEN HORNE: I'm flying to Bukoba

ELLEN: To be honest, I was a little bit worried that ...

ELLEN: I can see the sun setting over Lake Victoria.

ELLEN: ... that the medical journal article just wasn't true.

JAD: Yeah that's what I expected was just a total hoax.

ELLEN: Yeah, or that it was some kind of stunt.

ELLEN: We might be getting close.

ELLEN: I just sort of doubted the general credibility of the whole thing.

ELLEN: Okay, we've arrived in Bukoba.

ELLEN: Okay, so I get to Bukoba.

ELLEN: This is totally the most beautiful place.

ELLEN: Bukoba is a tiny port town.

ELLEN: It's green and lush.

ELLEN: In this very remote part of northern Tanzania.

ELLEN: Good morning.

ELLEN: And my first step was just to spend a couple of days walking around and asking everybody that I ran in to who spoke English about this contagious laughter.

ELLEN: An epidemic of laughter.

ELLEN: I guess I imagined, you know, this happened in the '60s so I'm looking for people who are like in their 70s and 80s. Turns out that I didn't need old people. Young people totally knew what I was talking about.

WOMAN: Oh yeah, I know what you mean.

ELLEN: Because it still happens today.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: The first time I saw it it was in 1991.

ELLEN: 1991.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Yeah.

ELLEN: I went to this tour office, and the first person I met there was this guy named Raymond.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: I'm Raymond.

ELLEN: What's your last name?

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Umpwena.

ELLEN: He said he thought he could find me somebody who had had it.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Maybe if you give me three hours I can find out.

ELLEN: Okay, let me give you my phone number.

ELLEN: About an hour later I get a text from him that says meet me in a half hour. I hop in his car, we drive off.

ELLEN: So how did you find this person?

RAYMOND UMPWENA: I know everybody in town, and everybody knows me.

ELLEN: He's not kidding. Raymond is a former Tanzanian national soccer team star. He's like a local celebrity. Kids follow him down the street. Raymond drives me up this dirt road about 10 minutes. We get to this blue cement building. We sit outside on the porch in these white plastic chairs, and we wait.

ELLEN: Hello.

ELLEN: After about 20 minutes, this woman comes out. Really beautiful, has a mole on her nose, long eyelashes.

ELLEN: Will you ask her if she'll introduce herself for me?

ELLEN: She's nervously squeezing this plastic water bottle that's in her hand.

CONCHESTER ANTON: Conchester Anton.

ELLEN: Conchester is her name. She tells me that in her high school, there were three girls who were affected. And for all of them it happened during exams.

ELLEN: An exam, a test?

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Yeah.

ELLEN: Well do you remember what the test was?

RAYMOND UMPWENA: [speaking Swahili]

CONCHESTER ANTON: [speaking Swahili]

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Mathematics.

ELLEN: It was the morning of the math test. She remembers walking into the exam room. She sat down, she looked at her paper, and suddenly something came over her.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: And she started laughing.

ELLEN: And then she took off all her clothes.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: She started undressing.

ELLEN: Undressing?

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Yeah, and they got her and took her to hospital.

ELLEN: She says she doesn't remember much else from that. She's told that she fought when they tried to restrain her. She spent three days in the hospital. They would give her Valium, make her pass out. Then she'd wake up, feel a little bit better for a while and it would come on again. She'd uncontrollably be laughing, then they would give her more Valium, she'd pass out.

ELLEN: Why do you think this happens? The laughing sickness?

ELLEN: She says it happens for girls who are not free.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: For girls who are not free.

ELLEN: I asked her if she felt free. I'm not even sure what they're talking about, but I asked her if she felt free, and she said, "Well when you live with your parents, and you're that age, no one's really free." She said she had a boyfriend, and her parents wouldn't let her see him. In the hospital when she had the laughing sickness, he was allowed to come visit.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Yes.

JAD: This girl ...

ELLEN: Yeah.

JAD: ... has a crazy attack of laughing, and then her boyfriend shows up, and she's just fine?

ELLEN: Well, more like she's allowed to see her boyfriend.

JAD: So it's about the ...

ELLEN: While she's ...

JAD: Hmm.

ELLEN: I mean, the real common association with this sickness is that it's a teenage girl disease.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Only to girls.

CONCHESTER ANTON: It is for girls.

ELLEN: It only happens to girls?

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Yeah, yeah. A girl 16 to 20 years old. Crying and sometimes laughing.

ELLEN: I talked to a school nurse, a psychiatric nurse from a local hospital, a doctor. And they all said vaguely the same thing. The reason it happened was that it had something to do with the transitions of adolescence.

JAD: And just out of curiosity, you're a girl?

ELLEN: Mm-hmm?

JAD: Is there something about this that makes sense to you?

ELLEN: Yes. Out of curios—yeah, sure. You're just beginning to negotiate your relationship to sex, and boys, and there's these new pressures, and these new responsibilities that are really challenging.

JAD: It's funny, boys don't have that problem. We just want to have sex.

ELLEN: It's a crisis for girls.

JAD: Yeah.

ELLEN: It does kind of make sense.

JAD: Okay.

ELLEN: It doesn't really explain anything about 1962 to me.

JAD: Why not?

ELLEN: Because in 1962 it wasn't just teenage girls.

JAD: Oh.

ELLEN: It was boys. It was men. It was villages full of people of all ages. So what explains that?

Fortunately for me, I had found a woman who was there.

ELLEN: Hello. How are you?

ELLEN: Gertrude is in her 50s she's got short loose curls, and a big smile. In 1962 when the laughter epidemic struck her village she got it too.

GERTRUDE: I was six years old.

ELLEN: Yeah.

GERTRUDE: Really young.

ELLEN: Do you remember?

GERTRUDE: I remember, yes.

ELLEN: Yeah, she remembers seeing hundreds of people coming down with this strange affliction and it took many forms. Some were laughing ...

GERTRUDE: Everlasting laughter, then laugh and cry at the same time.

ELLEN: At the same time?

GERTRUDE: [crying and laughing] What happened to me, was I was not able to talk. Crying only, and then my eyes were closed as if there is a gum on my eyes. My mom she carried me on her back.

ELLEN: They walked, they walked over the hills. Her mom carrying her on her back for hours. A long the way they ran into other people, boys, girls, men ...

GERTRUDE: Even older ones.

ELLEN: Dozens of people all headed the same way, laughing, crying.

GERTRUDE: Grabbing at the other skin.

JAD: Where were they going?

ELLEN: To the witch doctor.

GERTRUDE: This witch doctor.

ELLEN: They didn't know what else to do. Hundreds of people she says converged on this woman's tiny hut.

GERTRUDE: They were going inside ten by ten in the house. They were full. They had to stay outside, there were many.

ELLEN: There was so many people going to the witch doctor?

GERTRUDE: Yeah the many people. It was terrible.

ELLEN: What do you think the problem was?

GERTRUDE: Okay. I was asking my elder once what was the problem. They said that it was something spiritual, a spiritual event.

ELLEN: Yeah.

GERTRUDE: Because one year before this problem there were certain insects ...

ELLEN: She said that about a year before the laughter epidemic caterpillars had shown up.

GERTRUDE: They were breading in they spread all over the ground.

ELLEN: There was this huge infestation. One of the explanations was that the people who got sick had walked across the caterpillars.

GERTRUDE: They stepped on this caterpillars.

ELLEN: And had killed them.

GERTRUDE: As a result ...

ELLEN: The spirit of the caterpillars were possessing them.

GERTRUDE: ... they started to get this feeling.

ELLEN: Now she sort of dismissed that as not scientific.

GERTRUDE: Maybe these caterpillars had a certain bacterias which affected the brain.

ELLEN: Okay, this explanation that there was some sort of bacteria, or virus, I had already checked it out. I had gone to the government hospital to talk to the medical officer. They'd never found any physical cause for this.

OFFICER: There's not any medical importance which was found.

ELLEN: I'd even talked to a lab technician.

LAB TECHNICIAN: I'm a technician.

ELLEN: Who had checked blood samples in 1962.

LAB TECHNICIAN: Everything was negative.

ELLEN: They tested the water supply, the food supply.

LAB TECHNICIAN: Negative, negative.

ELLEN: So that the caterpillars seemed like a dead end. I tried a different tack. I asked Gertrude what was going on then at that time in your village. She thought about it for a while, and then she said. Well of course there was ...

GERTRUDE: Independence.

ELLEN: Independence. For 40 years, Tanzania had been a British colony. But in 1961 Tanzania had declared independence.

JAD: And this was right before?

ELLEN: Just weeks before that first girl started laughing.

ELLEN: Gertrude, I don't know much about independence. What can you tell me about independence?

GERTRUDE: What I experienced back then was people going around, singing, beating drums, dancing. It was the independence. Apart from that I can't tell more what's independence, because I was very, very young.

ELLEN: Gertrude said that she knew somebody who would remember more, someone I should talk to.

GERTRUDE: This Mr. Sospeta.

ELLEN: A 71-year-old man, Mr. Sospeta.

GERTRUDE: Who was assisting the witch doctor.

ELLEN: He was the witch doctor's assistant?

GERTRUDE: Maybe this man can help more.

ELLEN: Yeah.

GERTRUDE: Than I.

ELLEN: Do you want some coffee or some breakfast here first?

ELLEN: On my very last day in Bukoba, Raymond and I sat down with this man, the witch doctor's assistant at a restaurant near my hotel. Tiny guy. Gray hair, and big oversized suit, and he filled in some of the missing pieces.

ELLEN: Will you tell him I want to know what he remembers?

ELLEN: I asked him about the independence celebration that Gertrude described, the ones just before the laughter epidemic. He painted a very different picture.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: I remember. I would mark a check, any marker these things.

ELLEN: He was 26 at the time, but after the parties died down he said change swept through his village. Immediately following independence Tanzania became a socialist state, and the new government was out to create a new world order. Land changed hands, they abolished the local clans.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: The president, President Nyerere, after the independence ...

ELLEN: And the local religions.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: They banned the spirit.

ELLEN: This was the brand new age. This was the new era. You were supposed to have a modern belief system. The entire village was being asked to abandon the way that they had worshiped for thousands of years. Within weeks the churches moved in. Suddenly they had business. Catholic church opened up on one side of the street, and a Lutheran on the other.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: Christians were telling people, convincing villagers to join different religions.

ELLEN: They even handed out money. It was kind of a bidding war for souls. All of it was too new, too fast. He even remembers this one particular night that everyone in his village gathered outside, and stared at the sky.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: They had been told that was the end of life on Earth. At midnight everyone was out the whole night waiting to see whether they are going to die.

ELLEN: He told me, we saw the heavens and the moon slamming into each other.

RAYMOND UMPWENA: What they saw, it was an eclipse of the moon. That's what they said.

ELLEN: An eclipse of the moon. Looking back on it, maybe that was the end of the world, of that old world. Here's this guy, this witch doctor's assistant, who introduced himself to me actually as an elected official.

ROBERT: Oh that's interesting.

ELLEN: He made this jump in his life. That was a particular period of time when everybody was making this big jump, all of a sudden.

JAD: So you think that this laughing epidemic had something to do with like an avalanche of newness.

ELLEN: Yeah. Of all the explanations I came across, this is the one that makes the most sense to me.

ROBERT: It's plausible to me too. You've got a loss of religion, an arrival of a new religion, a loss of a political culture, a new leader. That's a very large pile up of change, all of a sudden.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And of course everyone is a little bit scared, so there's a quiet, and then someone starts to laugh.

ELLEN: Who knows why that first girl went crazy, and why she started making crazy laughing noises, but it was like people saw that and they were like oh God I feel like that too.

ROBERT: It sounds like laughter but you could think of it as ...

JAD: As like a collective scream, or something.

ROBERT: Yeah.

ELLEN: Like the entire society was a 16-year-old girl in 1962.

JAD: Radiolab Producer Ellen Horne. Well that's it for us, at least for now. For more information on the Tanzanian laugh epidemic, or anything else you heard in this hour visit Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll see you later.

[LISTENER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, Lulu Miller, Rob Christiansen, Ellen Horne, Elizabeth Giddings. Production support by Sally Herships, Sarah Peligrene, Ariel Latsky, Heather Radke, Michael O'Ryan McManis and Soren Wheeler. Thanks to Gail Cleaver, Beth Barrack, Bingo Nightly, Emily Webber and Sharon Counts. Finally, special thanks to Casey Cromwell. Radiolab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio.]

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.