Annamaria on Monday
I've been saying to my mournful friends who are having trouble coping with the news: Laughter is the best medicine. I truly believe that. But then, this morning, I remembered something that I came across by accident in my research. A situation in which laughter became a disease. Here again is the scoop on that.
In 1962, in a boarding school for girls in a small town in
Tanganyika (now Tanzania), a group of young students broke out in peels of
laughter. It’s not unusual for young
girls can get the giggles. We all know
that. But this was different. An epic case of the giggles.
What actually happened has been mythicized, and looking back
on it, many researchers think exaggerated.
Here is the most common description of what happened.
A bit of background.
In 1961, Tanganyika gained its freedom from its British colonial
government. Within a few months,
suddenly everything was changing—what was expected of children in school, the
practice of traditional religions, the laws that governed the country. The general state of flux flummoxed most
people, especially the least educated and most downtrodden of the citizens.
The schoolgirls in question were to take a math test one day
in early 1962. Suddenly, as the exam was
about to begin, one of the students broke out in uncontrollable laughter. Laughing, as we all have experienced, can be
quite contagious. Soon a score of girls
were in hysterics. Literally, it turns
out. What happened next is not precisely
documented but has been widely reported as follows.
The laugher spread to other classrooms. It became impossible to stop it. Eventually, the hilarity caused chaos, and the
school had to be closed. Parents came to
take their children home, spreading the epidemic to several villages. Thousands of people were affected.
At first, doctors thought it might have been some sort of
weird virus or strange form of malaria.
No dice. Nothing microbial was
detected. Depending on whom you consult,
the outbreak lasted somewhere between six and eighteen months. People
did not laugh continuously. That would
have been physically impossible. But evidently,
after pauses, the sufferers relapsed, and the rolling laughter continued.
So what. Laughter is
good thing. No?
Well, no!
This kind of laughter has nothing to do with glee. It comes to people, not from merriment, but
from anxiety and brings along with it pain, fainting, inability to breathe,
tears, and rashes. The underlying cause
is mass hysteria. The official diagnosis
is Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI).
Stress sets it off—usually in a workplace or a school.
And it is not localized to Africa. Something similar happened in Lafayette,
Indiana in the twenty-first century. They didn’t want to admit that it was
psychological, so they blamed it on bug bites and sprayed insecticide.
A well-known outbreak of MPI
took place in the West Bank in 1983.
The symptoms there were fainting and dizziness. 943 people were hospitalized, most of them
Palestinian schoolgirls, but also a number of female Israeli soldiers. The
government blamed it on propaganda
MPI almost always affects people who are poor and
powerless. Looking back at history, researchers
have identified a few strange outbreaks of “disease” as MPI, most notably, the
Dancing Plague of 1518 in Strasbourg. During
the month that it lasted, around 400 people danced for days on end. Some died of heart attacks, stroke, or just
plain exhaustion. Other outbreaks of
choreomania (also called St. Vitus Dance) occurred in Germany, the Netherlands,
England, France, Italy, and Switzerland between 1374 and into the 17th
century. But the largest by far was the
one in 1518 in Strasbourg.
Mass hysteria. When
life becomes intolerable.
Given the stressful times we are now going through, I wonder
how MPI will next manifest itself.
On Thanksgiving Day, after dinner, my brothers and I decided to revive an old family tradition - to watch Mel Brooks masterpiece Blazing Saddles. We were looking for some healing laughter. The movie was still brilliant, but it was not so easy to laugh at it, because we soon realized that you could never make such a movie today. In 1974, the racists, the bigots, the money hungry were easy butts of jokes. They were the stupid, the ridiculous. "American Indians" speaking Yiddish? That was hilarious. Nowadays, it might be considered antisemitic.
The humor of the 1970s -today- turned about to be a way to stop laughter. Sad!
