It struck me that people often thanked her afterwards for the fun they had had. They clearly felt good, suggesting laughter might provide some sort of physical release. Usually laughing does make people feel better, hence the rows of people happy to sit in laughter clinics, chuckling contentedly. Occasionally, however, laughter does not denote happiness.
the laughter epidemic
In 1962 a very strange thing happened in the village of Kashasha near Lake Victoria in what is now Tanzania. At a small Catholic girls’ boarding school there were 159 pupils. On 30th January three girls began laughing for hours at a time, then crying and then laughing again. Two weeks later they were still laughing. By the middle of March so many pupils were laughing that the school was temporarily closed down. No one knew the reason for the laughter or the tears, but it seemed to be contagious. After the school was closed the girls went to other schools and the epidemic seemed to spread. Soon boys were laughing too. In the village of Nshamba the hysteria spread to more than 200 inhabitants and even to young adults. Soon two boys’ schools had to be closed down for the same reason. Blood tests were taken to test for food poisoning, but everything appeared normal. Six months later people were still giggling – it was a laughter epidemic. The outbreak is often described in works on laughter, usually as a joyful occasion. But it seems it was no laughing matter. Christian Hempelmann from Purdue University in the United States believes that in fact the girls may have been suffering from a mass psychogenic illness of which laughter was one of the symptoms. He believes the condition was caused by the transition occurring in the country at the time. Independence had been achieved in December 1961 and schools were growing with the aim of providing free education for as many children as possible. Hempelmann believes the hysteria might have been a response to the stress of suddenly going to Western-style schools; far from enjoying themselves the pupils were suffering.
Although the researchers who first published details of the case in The Central African Journal of Medicine in 1963 themselves suggested that mass hysteria could be the explanation, it’s intriguing that a humorous explanation has been sought ever since, with writers wondering what the original joke could have been, a joke so good that it apparently made people laugh for months. We seem to have a desire to make sense of our emotions, particularly when they are as intense as uncontrollable laughter. The need to look for explanations was illustrated by the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who was examined in 1998 as part of an investigation into her epileptic seizures. When the doctors applied an electric current to a certain part of her brain she burst out laughing, even when distracted by other activities. It was intriguing that each time she looked for a justification for her laughter, saying how funny the doctors were or that the picture of the horse they had shown her was hilarious. Although joy can be free-floating, when we observe that joy in ourselves we are inclined to look for meaning. Instead of searching for an explanation for individual instances of happiness, perhaps the crucial question is why we have evolved to experience this feeling at all.
the purpose of joy
Everything had been planned for the Saturday night. We were staying with friends in Scotland, the wine was chilling and the lamb was roasting. Everything was in place for us to have an enjoyable evening. Then the host’s mobile phone rang yet again. He was a vet on-call and throughout the weekend we’d become accustomed to his answers which usually seemed to be, ‘It sounds as though your dog has a cough. I don’t think an emergency appointment will really be necessary.’ We assumed this call would be more of the same, but it wasn’t. He rushed out to the surgery at the end of the road, with his wife as assistant. Our main job was to keep an eye on the roast potatoes or so we thought until the phone rang half an hour later. They needed more pairs of hands and we would be able to get there faster than the veterinary nurse. We let ourselves into the surgery, found the operating theatre in the basement and there on the table was a tiny Chihuahua with a transparent tube in her mouth and her insides spilling out of a red slit across her stomach. She was having a Caesarean section. The vet slid his hand inside and swiftly pulled out something that looked like a dead, shaved mouse. As he shook it hard, its head flopped backwards and forwards. To us, with no knowledge of veterinary medicine, it looked as though this might break its neck. Instead it came to life, still floppy with eyes still tightly shut, but coughing softly. Meanwhile we followed his instructions to create a miniature hot water bottle by filling a plastic glove with warm water and took it in turns to rub the tiny creature’s chest continuously to keep it breathing. It was hard work and to us the puppy soon looked dead again, but eventually he could breathe alone. We were ecstatic. By now the mother was coming round. ‘Let’s show her the puppy. Can we put it beside her?’ we asked. ‘You can if you want to, but she won’t care. She’s in shock.’ She woke up, shivering and horrified. She wasn’t quite as thrilled as we were. Unlike the proposed entertainment of a delicious meal and nice wine with our friends, this joy was totally unplanned, but all the better for it.
The fact that unexpected variety can bring such pleasure could indicate one of the purposes of joy – to motivate us to experiment with different activities or places. When we feel scared we are forced to narrow our focus in order to concentrate on the danger, but the opposite happens when we feel happy; our perspective broadens, allowing us to make new discoveries, a skill which may not be essential today, but which would have been useful in hunter-gatherer communities. Experiences of joy also strengthen ties with other people, ties which could be important for survival. Dylan Evans, an expert in artificial intelligence from the University of the West of England, believes that joy could have a further evolutionary purpose; joy advertises our mental and physical fitness. If you are able to pursue joy openly then you must have met your basic needs such as food and shelter, which makes you a more attractive mate.
Some researchers believe that we have a basic brain system for joy, which explains our tendency to take any opportunity to be playful. If you watch people working in an office, provided they have the time and the autonomy, they are ready to take any opportunity to feel joy; they are primed to have fun. I remember a colleague once admitting he could do a one-handed handspring. Then someone else said they could do that dance move from Singing in the Rain where the dancer steps up onto a chair back and lets it tip over backwards until it brings them to the floor. Inevitably the rest of us insisted on proof and we soon discovered that office ceiling fans make handsprings tricky and why actors in musicals avoid using typists’ chairs on castors. When I was a child I remember being very shocked when my father broke his finger in a desk-jumping competition in his office – shocked not that he’d injured himself, but that adults would play in that way.
The first person to win the $100,000 Templeton Positive Psychology prize was Barbara Fredrickson from the University of Michigan. After studying positive emotions for more than a dozen years, she believes that they have a specific role – to ameliorate the effects of negative emotions on the body. To demonstrate this theory Professor Fredrickson first induced anxiety in a group of volunteers by telling them that in one minute’s time they would be required to give a speech which was to be filmed for evaluation by the rest of the group. The nerves soon began to show in their raised blood pressure and heart rates. Then they were given a film to watch which was either funny, happy, sad or neutral. It was found that the people who watched either the funny or happy film recovered their normal heart rates and blood pressure faster than the others, indicating that positive emotions can help to undo the cardiovascular effects of negative emotions. This might explain why certain stressful professions such as medicine become known for the dark humour that often accompanies the work. Medical students working in casualty for the first time are far more likely to recount tales of patients who claim to have fallen onto a peeled carrot while gardening than to concentrate on grisly stories about the appalling injuries they have seen. The deliberate creation of joy through humour works as an effective coping mechanism.
The thought of future joy also has the benefit of encouraging us to plan ahead. One of the happiest moments in my life was the day my best friend Jo passed her driving test. We were seventeen and lived about twenty miles apart, but we knew that her ability to drive would lead to multiple opportunities for potential joy. No longer would we have to rely on our parents or older boys for lifts. To celebrate we set off in her rusty,