The Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962 was an outbreak of mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness (MPI), rumored to have occurred in the near the village of Kashasha on the western coast of Lake Victoria in the modern nation of Tanzania near the border of Kenya.

Contents [hide] 1 The incident 2 See also 3 Sources 4 External links

[edit] The incident

It is possible that, at the start of the incident, a joke was told in a boarding school, and that this joke triggered a small group of students to start laughing. The laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause.

The Tanganyika laughter epidemic is sometimes understood as implying that thousands of people were continuously laughing for months. However this may not have been the case. Other reports tell that the epidemic consisted of occasional attacks of laughter among groups of people, occurring throughout vicinity of the village of Kashasha at irregular intervals. According to reports, the laughter 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. The following symptoms were reported on an equally massive scale as the reports of the laughter itself: pain, fainting, respiratory problems, rashes, and attacks of crying.

[edit] See also

• Dancing mania
• Dancing Plague of 1518

[edit] Sources

• Hempelmann, Christian F. (March 2007). "The Laughter of the 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic" (abstract). HUMOR - International Journal of Humor Research 20 (1): 49–71. doi:10.1515/HUMOR.2007.003. http://www.atypon-link.com/WDG/doi/abs/10.1515/HUMOR.2007.003. (Access to the full text may be restricted.)

• Rankin, A.M.; Philip, P.J. (May 1963). "An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba district of Tanganyika". Central African Journal of Medicine 9: 167–170. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=13973013. (Only citation information available through Pubmed; the text of this article is available here.)