Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness in the vicinity of the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania. Due to its nature the incident has been confused with positive humorous and/or infectious laughter as seen in phenomena like the Holy Laughter movement. The nature of MPI, however, is quite dissimilar to these more purely euphoric experiences.
The incident
Details on this occurrence, as so often with cases of MPI, are nonexistent. The sparse records of this incident have been embellished and misquoted, so it is best to take the recorded chain of events with a grain of salt. The epidemic seems to have started within a small group of students in a boarding school, possibly triggered by a joke. Laughter, as is commonly known, is in some sense contagious, and for whatever reason in this case the laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause. Since it is physiologically impossible to laugh for much more than a few minutes at a time, the laughter must have made itself known sporadically, though reportedly it was incapacitating when it struck. The school from which the epidemic sprang was shut down; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off.
Though the epidemic may have started in humor, the oft-noted laughter became significant in an entirely different way. Other, more worrisome symptoms were reported on a similarly massive scale; pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes, and attacks of crying all appeared to some extent. This laughter epidemic is often misunderstood as implying that thousands of people were continuously laughing for months. As noted above, this is impossible; the true nature of the epidemic was occasional attacks of laughter among groups of people, occurring throughout the noted region at irregular intervals.(...)
