Laugh and the whole world laughs with you

Perhaps the most unusual documented case of mass psychogenic illness was the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962. A paper published the following year in the Central African Journal of Medicine described what happened.

Triggered by a joke among students at a Tanzania boarding school, young girls began to laugh uncontrollably. At first there were spurts of laughter, which extended to hours and then days.

The victims, virtually all female, suffered pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes and crying attacks, all related to the hysterical laughter. Proving the old adage that laughter can be contagious, the epidemic spread to the parents of the students as well as to other schools and surrounding villages.

Eighteen months passed before the laughter epidemic ended.

That must have been some joke. Still, at least it wasn’t this one.

The whole article is actually pretty fascinating, from the mysterious dancing plague of 1518 to “plagues of koro — an irrational male fear that one’s genitals have been stolen or are fatally shrinking into the body.”