Radiolab - Laughter

Episode Date: February 25, 2008

We all laugh. This hour of Radiolab asks why.

Jad? Yeah. Let me play you this. Buddy. Yes, Mom. You're listening to Mike Nichols. I've been thinking. And Elaine May.

You're getting older now. You're nearly a man. And you should start thinking about your future a little bit, you know. You're listening to a rehearsal that happened to get caught on tape. Okay. You're a happy boy. What are they laughing about? The God's sake.

What are they laughing about? He's the thing. He has a joke in his head. I know what I'd like to do with my life. But he just can't get the punchline out without ruining it with a laugh. I'll have to train for some years. Wait, what was the job? I didn't even hear the joke.

Well, you haven't heard it yet. He wants to be when he grows up. He would be a registered nurse. A registered nurse. The joke is, I want to be a nurse. I want to be a nurse. That's the joke. But he can't say the word nurse without losing it.

Nor can she say the word nurse without losing it. And yet that is their punchline. And why is that funny? Well, remember, it's 1959, and boys don't want to be registered nurses. Not in 1959. That's for Mike Nichols, the funniest thing he's thought of all weeks. Not funny. But he can't.

Wait, sure. But, Mother, I want very much to be a registered nurse. Stop laughing. I love this. I love this rehearsal. I don't know why. But I could listen to this. this 150 times.

I have listened to it. 150 times. I want very much to be a registered nurse. So no go on that one. He can't do it. Understand, this laughter just keeps bubbling up. Mike can't control it. Elaine can't control it.

Here's the thing, Jen. These are two of the greatest humorists of the mid-20th century in the United States. They're professional. improvisational comics. They live to laugh. They control laugh. They try to create laugh. They're all about laughter. And yet, laughter beats them. Here we are the species with the capacity for language, which allows us exquisitely nuanced expressions. This is Tyler Stillman. He studies laughter at Florida State University. And yet we produce these kinds of bizarre sounds. You know, laughter is this

kind of clumsy, inarticulate way of expressing ourselves, but it's also kind of awesome. So looking forward, is the question then, why is laughter so awesome? I hate that word awesome, but I will say

that it's a good question to ask, why do we laugh, what is laughter for, and why those sounds? Why those sounds? All right, well, let's go. Our topic today is laughter. I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krellwitch. This is Radio Lab. Okay, so to get started, the thing we just talked about, the weirdness of laughter.

You know how it's both like clumsy on one hand, but also kind of awesome. I know you love that word. Awesome. Why you'd have to say that word all the word? Well, in a case. Delightful is delightful. All right, delightful. What I really want to say is that that sort of paradox is something that some of the greatest minds in history have thought about and written about.

Like. Where, Aristotle? In a book called De Anemoleum. Aristotle wants to describe what separates human beings out from all the other creatures. That's historian Barry Sanders. He wrote a book about laughter called Sudden Glory. And according to him, after pages and pages of complicated reasoning about what makes us special, is it language, is it reason, is it this, is it that? Aristotle concludes one thing.

What makes us absolutely different is our capacity to laugh. When you laugh, go ahead, do it. That right there. That is a specifically human endeavor. No other creatures can do it. Not only that, the first time you do it. You mean like when you're a little peeper? When you're a tiny baby and you make your first laugh,

that to Aristotle might be the most important moment of your life. Because it's the moment that your life, at least as a human being, begins. When the infant utters its first laugh, emits its first laugh. At that moment, heated air from lower in the stomach moves through a membrane, into the soul, in souls the creature. And at that point, then this is the fine distinction, at that point, the creature moves from being a human into a human being. Yes, yes, he's absolute, I remember it so clearly.

The symbols, the clashes. I said, oh, I'm a human being. But, but, but, but do you remember when it happened? No. Well, Aristotle was very specific about this. He thought it always happened or should happen. On the 40th day of your existence. Mina, today is your 40th day.

We wanted to check this proposition. So we called up radio producer Amanda Arancheck, who just had a brand new baby girl. Mina is celebrating her 40th day of existence today. We're going to get you to laugh. Were you able to record with Mina this morning? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

No, we recorded for 50 minutes. Really? We just like went for it. And did she laugh? Well, I tried. Rob tried. Her aunt tried. What a glove of girl.

A laugh I would almost say. You know, like we all tried and tried and kind of harass her and like stick your tongue at her and try to tickle her. And then at the end she's like, ah. It's because of your mom. Lost it. We have yet to get a giggle out of her. That was a smile. What would it take to make you laugh?

But she made some sounds we've never, ever heard before. Like her level of interaction in the last two days has been more than anything we've seen. Really? Like if you stick your tongue at it or she does it back. And if you open your mouth, she kind of tries to do that too. It has been a milestone, you know, aside from the actual day count. Like it really is, she's becoming a little being. It's much more emotional.

It's like you're looking at this thing that you're just. deeply in love with and it's finally like looking back at you. Well, Amanda, when it happens, will you call us right back? Okay, I will for sure. Do you agree with Aristotle that the ability to laugh is what literally separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom? God, how can I disagree with Aristotle that would be, you know, blasphemous? Not as an accident. I mean, you as a person.

As a person. I truly believe we're the only creature that laughs. What about you? I do think there's something about the way we laugh, the way we share, the emotional feeling that leads to laugh. That is kind of, I don't know of any other creatures that do that. You can't do that to me. Screw you. I don't know if it's wrong, because in all honesty, the scientific debate is still, the jury's still out on this question, whether we are the only ones that laugh.

But it's one of those things that if you poke around a bit, and let's poke, shall we? Okay. Be beside you. The question becomes much more complicated. Oh, okay. So introduce yourself, so I don't mangle your name too badly. Oh, absolutely. My name is Yach Panksep.

Yacht Panksep. Yes. Yac Panksep is a neuroscientist. Washington State University. And for the last 30 years, he has studied animal emotion, particularly, and this is his specialty. Happiness and play. Play. Playfulness.

in rats, for example. Do rats play? Yeah. Oh, yes. When they're still young and you put them together, they start tussling immediately. But when they play, they're silent. I mean no squeaks or anything?

All the while, they are headbutting each other, they're flipping each other over, they play really hard. No sounds. That's our starting point, okay? So one day, Yock and a grad student are standing in front of a rat cage watching two rats wrestle silently,

and the grad student, this guy by the name of Brian, turns to York and says, is it really possible they're not making any noises? I mean, look at them. Maybe they're making sounds, but we just can't hear them. So, he suggested, Diak, why don't we order one of these little black boxes? Or they call them bat detectors? The nature of people use to listen to bats. What if we put one on the rat cage?

Maybe it will take whatever sounds might or might not be there, lower them down to a range that humans can hear. And I said, okay, we'll buy the equipment. And the equipment arrived. And the first day, we had a couple animals playing, and we tuned it through the various frequencies. And lo and behold, it's like a playground at 50 killer. What did it sound like?

It's like, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit. So all of a sudden, you just heard this sound erupt from the little box? Absolutely, absolutely. Wow. So now they had the sound that no one had ever heard before, and there's two things you need to know. First, the rats would make the sound sporadically. Each little rat would make it just like... And second, Yock had no idea what the sound was.

What did it mean? What do they say? What are they saying to each other? He knew that had something to do with play, but was it just like a... Hi, hi, hi, hi. Or was it something more aggressive, like, you want a piece of me? Let's wrestle. That's what I think.

Or maybe they're excited and they're saying, Give me sex. You want to have sex? Or ralosal. I think it was ralage, make a couple of chirps. Or maybe it was just a grunt of some sort. There's a lot of possibilities. Ten years.

Ten years. They study this sound, trying to figure out what it means. And every theory failed somehow. Well, you know, nothing was conclusive. Then one morning, Yock walks in to the lab, which he showed us. We are going to the animal facility on the fifth floor. With a crazy idea. One morning, I came in and I said, Jeff.

His grad student at the time. Let's go tickle some rats. What on earth gave you that idea? I don't know. This is the mystery of having a new idea. Oh, okay. So he and his grad student quickly walk over to the rat cage. We pick up a rat.

We carry it to a box. We put it in the box. Okay, the animal's going in. And I begin to tickle it. And by tickle, it's just like you would tickle a baby. Meaning what? Like coo-c-coo-coo with the fingers. Yeah, you're moving your fingers.

rapidly all over the animal's body or some male rat. He demonstrated. Tickle. The sound that came out was the same chit-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-de-as before, but now it was louder, more continuous. You can see how consistent it is.

Plus, it had this very familiar rhythm and familiar dynamic quality, the way it went. And for the first time, it occurred to yuck. My God, what if that's laughter? What if that sounds? his laughter. Visually, I must say it's pretty convincing.

When you see him do it, and we put a video on our website, RadioLab.org, when you see him tickle the rat, and the rat kick its little rat legs and chirp like mad, it does look like the animal's cracking up. Like a little kid. What were you thinking at this moment? We were thinking, this a fluke.

It's a fluke. It's a fluke. It's a fluke. You see, you didn't trust her. you're hearing. Well, we trust what we're hearing, but I said, let me get another animal. Okay, here's another rat, ready for a tickle session. Tickle. Whoa. Bingo, exactly the same.

Chee, chit, chit, chit, chit, chit. I still kind of said, come on, this is too good to be true. Let me get another animal. Okay, here's tickle. Exactly the same. Jackpot. Here's the kicker. The moment Yock stops tickling the rats, moves his hand to away, the rat starts chasing his hand. He moves his hand left, the rat goes left, moves his hand right, the rat goes right. Exactly. The animal is glued to your hand. Because it wants to be tickled again. It wants more. Exactly. So cool. Whoa. I'm just running circles with my hand and the animal's running circles right after my fingers. Once some more, huh? Okay. And if you stop tickling and just

leave your hand there in the cage like a dead piece of meat, the animal knows you're a lot. The animal knows you're alive and gradually begins to pounce on your hand and it begins to nip at your finger. It's like, come on, come on. Exactly. Let me ask you this, though, in terms of calling the squeaking a squeak or a chirp or a chit-ch-ch-ch-ch-or- whatever you want to call it, that would be one thing. But to call it laughter is saying something very specific. Yeah, a lot of people don't like that word, huh?

Even my friends have advised me to drop that word. Because they don't think that a rat can feel joy? Is that one? Giving human qualities to animals has been a no-no since we are closer to the angels than the other creatures of the world. He laughs to be an angel. He was kidding, by the way. Oh, really? Oh, I kind of believed him.

Oh, you think that he was being... I thought he meant the laughter in the subtle way that he imagined. No, no, no, no. He thinks human laughter is not special. He thinks Aristotle's wrong, basically. it out Aristotle do an experiment. Like it goes back a long way, back to rats, back to pigeons, who knows,

and that all these creatures laugh like us, and they laugh more or less for the same reason as us. Hmm, I don't know. You tell a pigeon a good chicken crossing in the road joke and you're going to get nothing. Do you don't think that a pigeon has a rich emotional life? No, not like me.

No, I have talked with pigeons. Let me tell you something. All right, I'll give it that we'd probably laugh for irony. Yeah. We'd probably do that. And delight? Do you think a pigeon lasts for delight? I don't know, but sure, a pigeon experiences delight.

What do you know? You're not a pigeon. Forget the pigeon. Take a bird that sings. I bet birds sing because they're happy, and singing is probably in a way like laughing. Oh, if you're going to get all general on me, yeah, sure. Worms like to wiggle. And wiggling is kind of like laughing.

Yeah, okay. By the way, what's happened to baby Amanda? You mean, did she laugh yet? Yeah. Uh, no. Fortunately not. Oh, see, so Aristotle's really in deep doo-doo here. I mean, these days, I don't know about ancient Greece,

but these days, people who study this stuff say it's usually around 90 days. Oh, really? Well, really? A little time. Yeah, we've got a little time. I told her to call us back when she does laugh. Message one. Hey there, Dad, it's Amanda Arachic calling,

and I am calling to say that Mina just laughed. She just laughed. She actually full-on did a like, ha ha ha like that that was incredibly exciting but it was not day 40 it was day by my calculations 97 so

I don't know about Aristotle and those babies but this baby here laughed for real definitely 100% on day 97 so it's very exciting and we're very excited and now she's crying because there was so much effort

to laugh I think okay End of message. Now for the next question. Forgetting for a moment how we laugh, let's ask why we laugh. I'll tell you why we laugh. Why do we laugh? We laugh because something's funny.

No. No, no, no. The most important thing to remember about laughter is that it's social. And it's not about humor. That's Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, who got very interested in this question. So he went out on the street with some of his grad students pen in hand, and they listened for what people actually in. real life say just before they laugh. And in 85% of the cases, are you running this now?

85% of the cases, nothing funny preceded the laugh. Yeah. So first of all, people weren't really telling jokes to other people. They're saying things like, hey, where you been? I've got to go now. I have a class. I have a class. Ha ha ha. Yeah, this is the kind of things that people say before they left. Now, don't take my word for this. Go to a cocktail party. You're going to be a lot of laughter there, People are not telling jokes to each other at a furious rate. So laughter isn't about joking. It's about something else. It's about social relationships.

You've got to have those people there. When you're alone, laughter basically disappears. When you're at home alone, Jed? Do you ever find yourself laughing? When about myself? Yeah. Well, you see sometimes. When?

Like when I'm watching the TV or something? Well, no. Those are kind of vicarious social stimulus. I mean, like when you are solitary. If you take away media. No radio, no TV, You know, nothing in your ears. No.

Laughter basically disappears. So we have an unconsciously controlled, neurologically programmed social behavior. It will only work if there's a sharer. Even if the share is just in your head. And neurologically programmed by who? By evolution in this case. Towards the end of the interview, he walked me over to a TV VCR thing he had. The state-of-the-art stuff.

Yeah, this is pretty fancy. And he showed me a video of a woman tickling a chimpanzee. What is this? I have an example here of laughter from our primate ancestors. Baby chimps. Okay, we have now a chimpanzee on the screen, and you're listening to a chimpanzee playing with a woman. If you get a game going. That's the woman laughing.

She is now cuddling and smothering the chimp with cugs. And he's being tickled. That's chimpanzee. laughter. That panting sound you hear is chimpanzee laughter. A low level of chimpanzee panting laughter would be like

when they really get into it it becomes more gutteral like that sound that sound Provine thinks it has nothing to do with jokes. This is not a reaction to anything, although tickling is kind of delightful but what it really is doing he says that particular

sound is a signal one chimp to the other and those two chimps to any other animals that happen to come by, other chimps, we're just playing. Chimps have evolved. It's taken them a long time, but they've figured out a way to signal, we're not fighting, I'm not going to kill you, this is just play. It's the signal of we're just playing. We're safe.

And according to Provine, we inherited that signal from our chimp relative. Yeah, so basically, panting became ha ha ha panting became ha ha oh in a human we've just added

one little wonderful extra the H ha ha ha boom hmm all right

more in a moment message one uh radio lab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Somebody here is trying to grab my sheet of paper.

Okay. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio. You know, he's so good. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad. And I'm Robert. Today on our show, laughter. And I want to say one more thing about this.

We've talked about how laughter is evolutionarily sort of wired in. We've talked about that it's a social thing. all clear kind of situation. Yeah, but it's another level of safety that's kind of fascinating. Let me tell you a really classic and not well-known story. It involves the television show The Nanny. Remember in the 90s? Fran Drescher had this very big hit TV comedy series. Yeah, no.

You will probably remember the voice of the Nanny. Hello? That's Fran. Mom, what's the emergency? Mom, Mike Douglas isn't on Channel 4 because they canceled him 22 years ago. And the story actually is not so much about Fran Drescher as it is about, you hear those people laughing right underd Yeah, constantly. Yes. Well, this is about Fran's laughers. It's a story of the nanny laughers. And it begins with a woman named Lisette St. Clair.

Just, FYL, my name is pronounced Lizette. She's a casting director at Central Casting in Los Angeles. Central casting is the oldest extras casting company. It's been frowned for years and years and years. Back in the day where people used to line up outside the studios and the production will come out and pick you, you, you. She actually got her start as an extra. My first gig, I think it was called The Big House, and I had to jump out of a coffin.

But I was a hooker. I was a hooker out of a coffin. Anyway, after years as working as an extra, Lizette decided to jump to the other side of the business and be the person in charge of casting the extras. You know, you're on the phone, and production company calls and says, you know, I need three strippers,

two nurses, and four doctors. And so that's what we do. We find them. Now, here's some more background that you will need. In 1985, which is years before the nanny, Fran Dresher had been raped during a break-in at her apartment. Later, she wrote about this experience, and she spoke about it publicly. That night was the night that changed everything.

This is Fran, reading from her book, Kensers Schmencer. Two men with guns broke into our home and raped both me and my girlfriend, Judy, who had the misfortune of having joined us for dinner. We were never the same again. The people who did this to her were caught and locked up. And then things got worse. As her fame grew, she started getting stalked.

And this was right around the time that filming began on the nanny. And the thing about the filming the nanny, when it's filmed live, as they say, in front of a live studio audience, pretty much anybody can come into the theater. So Fran worried that someone who might mean, harm would come in and sit there during the show. So she and the show's producers decided to do the only thing they could do, get rid of the audience. Just tick them all out. Now, this was right in the middle of the season.

They had a taping to do the very next day. No matter how hard things became in our personal life, the show must go on. So they called up Lizette. They decided instead of having an audience come in, just have people from central casting that they know. And she said, all right, I'll fill your audience with extras. I was looking for about 30 or 40 people. She had thousands of people to choose from. And there were all kinds of categories available to her.

You know, you could do a search in the database, you know, height, ethnicity, skin color, dress size, eye color, you know, hair color. You could put that all in and it'll bring up what you need. She needed a safe audience. You know, just normal, lively people. She could screen. And while she was out, she thought, well, why don't I get people who are good lafers? I mean, why not?

Yeah. So, with 24 hours to go, she put out a rather strange request. I put it out on the sequencer. It's like a workline, a hotline of people listen to, and if they fit, or if they think they fit, then they'll call in. I said, hi, this is Lizette, and I'm looking for some people that have good laughs to work on the nanny tomorrow. And when they'd call, she'd begin with one question. Hi, my name is A. Donnie Mitchell. Okay, let me hear you laugh.

Okay. Hi, my name is Pam Wes. Let me hear you laugh. Hi, my name is Kim January. Like, you just saw the funniest thing. Let me hear you laugh. My name is Dennis Piler. I was at the laundromat. She answered the phone right away.

She goes, let's hear it. And everybody in the laundromat looked at me. And I said, it's an audition. It's an audition. She said, laugh right now. I said, ha, ha, ha, ha. These were people that were calling it that were like all ethnicities, all ages, 20-something to like 70-something. I had married couples.

And it's not a show like Baywatch where everybody has to look, you know, bikini-ready and all that. Which means like they weren't going to win a beauty contest, but they could get to the studio and sit down and laugh. There were certain things that we were laughing at, and they would come to us and say, okay, we don't want you to laugh at that. We knew when to laugh and when not to laugh, and then it got to the part where we just knew exactly what to do. Can you think of anything more wonderful than sitting in a comfortable chair all day long

and being amused? People look puzzled. What do you mean a laugher? So how much did you pay them? Back then, it was like $75. And you get paid? Yeah, we get paid for laughing. What a thing to do.

Lizette got a bunch of the laughers in a room together just to show us how it works. Okay, so this is like a little kind of like a murmur chuckle. It's not like a gut-wrenching, just a little bit of murmur chuckle. Okay, something just funny just happened, but it's not like a whole big long laugh. It's just something really quick and funny. And this one, something's happening, and it's like a little bit of chuckle, but then just something came out of it, just making it pee in your pants. And we all have our great individual laughs, but we were told not to stand out.

So we had to know each other, play off each other. And if somebody was, like, paused in their laughter, maybe we'd cover it. I mean, we were a well-timed orchestrated machine. Yeah, we were. So well orchestrated that their services became very desirable. You know, a chain reaction. Central casting began getting calls from other sitcoms.

On Drew Carey's show. From talk shows? They sprinkled us in the audience. And something odd began to happen on the sets. The actors began noticing the laughers. They would thank us. We want to know if we are right. Did we have enough food?

Was the food good? You know. And for a lot of these people who were used to working as extras and being pretty much ignored all the time, this was wonderful. They treated us as though we were principal, family. I mean, they recognize us, Christmas party.

and it's just like we were a part of them. You come and sit with and talk to us. You know, they appreciated us. So that's the part I love. Because, you know, we got their back. Yeah, and we did have their back. There was a time. We stayed after, and it was a scene where the nanny was climbing a telephone pole outside.

And she wanted us to come out there and do our thing so that the timing was right and felt right. And I think we went on 14 hours that night. It was wonderful. It is. And, you know, I almost want to cry. Everybody's so wonderful as a family here. It's laughers. And then, reality struck.

Who will be the battle for a quarter of a million dollars? I'm feeling of pure disgust with Tricia. I'm going to have to nominate George and Erica. Starting around 2000, reality TV, you know these shows. And there are no laughs required. They pushed sitcoms aside. And professional laughing work slowed down. To a trickle.

And we're laughing. Three times a week on different shows, there is like this momentum and this adrenaline, and suddenly it all comes to an end. And it's like, honest to God, it's like going through withdrawal. I found that when I'm not laughing, I'm a lot more depressed. And I found that it was great therapy for me on a weekly basis. I miss it. Oh, God.

I miss it. It's sad. Anybody out there needs any laugh for us? There's a whole room full of us. Look, we could use you. We could use you. Look, Chad, just go with me here. What is brown and sticky?

What? A stick. Thank you. And, Jan, I had Cheerios for breakfast this morning. This is mowing in high grass. And, Chad. Yes. I'm wearing brown shoes.

This is fun. You're all. All higher. This story was produced by Rob Christensen and reported by Mary Leth Kirshner. Support provided by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives at Dana.org, and the excerpt from Fran Dresher's book Cancer Schmenser was courtesy of cachette audio, our laughers. Interview were, Diva, Perry, Bonnie Choos, Gracie Sparanza, Adani Mitchell, Pam Waz,

Brent Purdue, Louise, Saxon, Jean Van Osdall, Sandy Elman, Bill Livingston, Adele Danilus, Tom Petra, Dennis Filer, and Kim, January. Okay, so here's the question. Robert, yeah. In that story somewhere there was a guy who had like an amazing laugh. Well, they all have amazing laughs, but there's one particular guy who just had like an outrageous laugh. This one?

Yeah, that guy. What is it about that kind of laugh that just gets you? Like, what is it about the sound? The laugh itself. Yeah. Well, I took that question. To somebody who studies acoustics. Of laughing.

Hello. Hi. Really? There's somebody who does that? I am Dr. Joanne, Becarowski. I'm an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. She's from my hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. And I study the sounds that we make. She has collected over 30,000 laughs.

Do we hear some? Yes. This is probably the biggest collection in the world. She analyzed everyone on the computer and played me a few. Just a little teeny scraps. I'll just go ahead and play this for you. Like this one? Wait, sorry, sorry.

Did it fail one more time? It sounds hysterical. It's like an alien. But every bit of that laugh, she thinks, has a secret evolutionary purpose. And she breaks it down from me. Starting with that first part of the laugh, a little breathy thing, which in her business, she calls a glottal whistle. She still got this glottal whistle thing going on here.

A glottal whistle. What's that again? It's the wheeze. Oh. Yeah. This is just creating turbulence in her glottis. It's like there's a storm going on down there. Now, a lot of people do the wheeze when they laugh.

I do. Why? It always happens at the beginning of a laugh, always at the beginning, which makes her think. That subglottal whistle seems to really say, hey, pay attention to me, and then you get this wonderful sound that follows. So the wheeze, she thinks, is like a laugher's gunshot to get you to listen up. Now, the sounds that follow, they jump around a lot in pitch, which again, she thinks has a purpose, considering when we talk, you know, we're, We keep it right here in the middle. I'm Linda Worthheimer. When we laugh, we go up and down.

We leap crazy octaves and land on really, really high notes like this. This sound here, and it's like a mouse squeak. This note, in pitch, is actually higher than the highest note in that famously unsingable aria, Queen of the Night. Really? You know, this laugh has got so much going on. On it. Acoustically extreme, that's what she calls it.

Acoustically extreme laughter. Which means that it's hard for our brains to process, and she's seen this on brain scans. We get a little jolt, a little psalm. When we hear a laugh that jumps pitches like that. 55 hertz, up to 276 hertz in a heartbeat. So maybe the pitch jumps, maybe the wheeze. These sounds, they're not random, she would argue.

They have specifically evolved to tweak us emotionally. Humans have the ability to produce a sound that makes other people feel good. And so if we can do that, then they're more likely to feel positively towards us and behave positively towards us. Because ultimately we want to shape their behavior towards us. What you're saying then is a laugh is a way of the laugher getting into the head of or under the skin of the other person. Maybe. Just maybe. Studies, in fact, have found that people laugh louder and more extremely around their boss. And over and over, Joanne has found that women tend to exaggerate their laughs when they're around men, men that they don't know.

With a stranger male, she is laughing a lot, and she is producing acoustically extreme laughter. And you can interpret that in a lot of different ways. She interprets it as a safety thing. The idea being that the male is inherently threatening, so you want to manipulate his emotional state so that he's positively disposed towards her. But there's another way to sort of interpret that, which is that you're essentially confirming the stereotype of the giggling girl. Yeah. The giggling girls have power. Don't I know it?

And on that note, let's end the segment with author Barry Sanders, who in his book, Sudn Glory, writes a lot about this relationship between laughter and power and laughter as a way to stay safe. Yeah. Were there moments, early moments, that you can remember, where you felt that acutely? Oh, absolutely. I can, you know, I can, you can't see them with me, but I can see them in my mind's eye. Well, paint the picture for me.

Well, you know, there's my father absolutely utterly drunk, and he's turning off the lights and turning on the lights in the house with such power that he's breaking the switches, and sparks are flying in the house. You know, sparks are going around in the house, and my mother is crying, and I said, wait, it's Fantasia. Everything's going to turn into color. Fantasia, I don't get it, though, because of the sparks.

Don't you remember in the middle of the movie, it just turns into technicolor. And there's sparks flying and there's magic wand going and Mickey's starting to touch things and they become vibrant and alive. That's what the house looked like to me. The house looked like Magic Mountain. You know, it was the Fourth of July. So I tried to convert it that way with him. And it actually worked. He took a few steps back, looked at the situation.

And he cracked up. I mean, I've always thought that anger, in Latin, the root for things like anger and anxiety and angina is a word called anxeri, which means to be without air. You know, you start to choke up and you tell someone, hey, take a deep breath. And laughter is about breath, after all. This is what Aristotle tells us. And so that's what would happen. He stopped for a second.

His shoulders would go down. He would relax. He would move from out of his throat into his belly. and laugh at the situation. Radio Lab will return in a moment. This is Candace currently calling from her bicycle. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thank you. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Eambramron. And I'm Robert Quilwick. In this hour, we are looking at laugh. Wait. What was that?

Okay, here we have the laugh box. That's a strange little device that Robert Provine from the University of Maryland, remember him from the previous? He played it to me, and he has a notion about this. Yeah, so basically you just need laughter, you know, to cause laughter. The notion here is you don't need a joke to start the laugh. All you need is a laugh. You can throw the joke away.

Laughter causes laughter. No, you can't get a laugh going from nothing. Well, actually, actually you can't. And he said, I'll prove it to you. So he showed me a videotape. This was at, in the mall. Excuse me, we're doing a study on laughter. Is laughter a good thing?

Absolutely. You laugh a lot. I laugh every day. I make my wife laugh all the time. What do you do that makes him laugh? Tripp. Spills a lot of things. One other thing.

We have a piece of apparatus here. you push the button close. Why were you laughing? I don't know. Did anyone tell a joke? No. Anyone do anything funny? No.

Me. I lost her. I don't know. It was true. Provide is absolutely correct about this. What we're dealing here is something that's very contagious. is contagious sometimes it's outrageous

All right Well, while we are on the subject of Contagious Laughter I've got a story to tell you We laugh till we can get all Great Good one too All right

Now imagine You with me Yeah Imagine Where would I go? I would just sit here I was just Your attention I mean

Oh yeah 1962 New rural village of Kashasha Tanzania Girls boarding school Girl is sitting in class She begins to laugh The girl next to her Maybe to her left

Here's her laugh And she begins to laugh Across the classroom A third girl joins in The teacher gets upset But it's too right Soon four girls and eight The entire class has begun to laugh

And then cry And then laugh and then crying At what? Just because, I don't know Anyhow a girl outside at that moment Walking down the hall Let's imagine she hears the laughter from the classroom She starts to laugh

And as she walks and laughs her laughter goes into other classrooms, and soon the whole school is doing this, laughing, crying, laughing, crying. Teachers cannot control these girls. When they try to, the girls get violent. They get violent? Yep, and the principal then has no choice.

He's got to close the school. They open the school a week later, and it happens again. So they close the school a second time. Meanwhile, the girls who started all this, they go back to their villages many, many miles away, and this thing, whatever it is, spreads up and down the coast of Lake Victoria.

You mean people in the villages start to wear? Yep. In one village, 217 people start to laugh and cry. A second boarding school has to shut down. And no one knows why. So a team of doctors, some British doctors in the area, they hop in a land rover and they rush out to investigate this strange phenomenon. And this is what they write.

The Central African Journal of Medicine, Volume 9, number 5. May 1963. The disease commenced on the 30th of January, 1962 at a Mission Run Girls Middle School at Cushche. The onset is sudden, with attacks of laughing and crying lasting for a few minutes to a few hours, up to a maximum of 16 days, followed by respite, and then a recurrence. In the report, there is an account of a 52-year-old man who saw some people afflicted with this sickness. And soon after returning to his hut, he felt something telling him to laugh and cry and shout. shout. This he continued to do for most of the night. No fatal cases have been reported. This is very... What? Is this true?

Yeah, I mean... Well, okay, we wondered. So we sent our producer Ellen Horn 40-some-odd years after the fact to see what she could find. I'm flying to Bacoba. To be honest, I was a little bit worried that I can see the sun's setting over Lake Victoria. That the medical journal article just wasn't true. Yeah, that's what I expected, was this a total hoax. Yeah, or that it was some kind of, like, stunt.

I just think I'd be getting close. I just sort of doubted the general credibility of the whole thing. Okay, we've arrived in Bacoba. Okay, so I get to Bacoba. This is totally the most beautiful place. Bacoba is a tiny port town. It's green and lush.

In this very remote part of northern Tanzania. One new morning. And my first step was just to spend a couple of days walking around and asking everybody that I ran into who spoke English. So I'm asking about this contagious laughter. An epidemic of laughter. I guess I imagined, you know, this happened in the 60s, so I'm looking for people who are like in their 70s and 80s. Turns out that I didn't need old people. Young people totally knew what I was talking about.

Yeah. Because it still happens today. The first time I saw it, it was in 1991. I went to this tour office, and the first person I met there was this guy named Raymond. I'm Raymond. He said he thought he could find me somebody who had had him. Maybe if you give me three hours, I can find out. Okay, let me give you my phone number.

About an hour later, I get a text from him that says, meet me in a half hour. Hop in his car, we drive off. So how did you find this person? I know everybody in town and everybody in town. He's not kidding. Raymond is a former Tanzanian national soccer team star. He's like a local celebrity. Like kids follow him down the street. So Raymond drives me up this dirt road about 10 minutes. We get to this blue cement building. We sit outside on the porch in these white plastic chairs and we just, we wait. Hello. After about 20 minutes, this woman comes out. It's really beautiful. It has them all on her nose, long eyelashes.

We ask her if she'll introduce herself for me. She's nervously squeezing this plastic water bottle that's in her hand. Conchester Anton. She tells me that in her high school, there were three girls who were affected. And for all of them, it happened during exams. Do you remember what the test was? I remember, it was. Mathematics.

It was the morning of the math test. She remembers walking into the exam room. She sat down. She looked at her paper and suddenly... Something came over her. And she started laughing. And then she took off all that clothes. She started undressing.

Undressing? And they caught her and took her to hospital. And then she says she doesn't remember much else from that. She's told that she fought when they tried to restrain her. She spent three days in the hospital. They would give her valium, make her pass out. Then she'd wake up, feel a little bit better for a while, and then it would come on again. And she'd uncontrollably be laughing.

Then they would give her more valium. She'd pass out. Why do you think this happens the laughing sickness? She says it happens for girls who are not free. And so I asked her if she felt free. I'm like, I'm not even sure what they're talking about. But I asked her if she felt free and she said, You know, when you live with your parents and you're that age, no one's really free.

She said she had a boyfriend and their parents wouldn't let her see him. But in the hospital, when she had the laughing sickness, he was allowed to come visit. So this girl has a crazy attack of laughing, and then her boyfriend shows up and she's just fine? Well, or more like she's allowed to. to see her boyfriend. So it's about the... While she's...

I mean, the real common association with this, with this sickness is that it's a teenage girl disease. Only to girls. It's for girls. Girls. It only happens to girls. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

A girl, 16 to 20 years old, crying and sometimes laughing. I talked to a school nurse, a psychiatric nurse from the local hospital, a doctor, and they all said vaguely the same thing. The reason it happened was that it had something to do with the transitions of adolescence. And just out of curiosity, you're a girl. Is there something about this that makes sense to you? There is, yes, out of curiosity. Yeah, sure.

You're just beginning to kind of negotiate your relationship to sex and boys. And there's these new pressures and these new responsibilities that are really challenging. It's funny. Boys don't have that problem. We just want to have sex. And it's a crisis for girls. Yeah. So it does kind of make sense.

Okay. But it doesn't really explain anything about 1962 to me. Why not? Because in 1962, it wasn't just teenage girls. It was boys. It was men. It was villages full of people of all ages. So what explains that?

Originally for me, I had found a woman who was there. Hello. Gertrude is in her 50s. She's got short, loose curls and a big smile. And in 1962, when... the laughter epidemic struck her village. She got it too. Six years old.

That's young. Very young. Do you remember? I remember this. Yeah, she remembers seeing hundreds of people coming down with this strange affliction. It took many forms. Some were laughing. Everlasting laughter.

Then laugh and cry at the same time. At the same time. What happened to me was I was not able. to talk, crying only, and then my eyes were closed as if there is a gum on my eyes. So my mom, she carried me on her back. And they walked. They walked over the hills, her mom carrying her on her back for hours. And along the way, they ran into other people.

Boys, girls, men. Even old ones. Dozens of people all headed the same way, laughing, laughing, crying. Oh, crabbing. their skin. Where were they going? To the witch doctor. To this witch doctor?

I didn't know what else to do. Hundreds of people, she says, converged on this woman's tiny hut. So they were going inside turn by turn. In the house, they were full. They had to stay outside. There were many. Because there were so many people going to the bush doctor.

Yeah, there were many people. It was terrible. What do you think the problem was? Okay. I was asking my elder once, What was the problem? They said that it was something like spiritual event. Because one year before this problem, there were certain insects.

She said that about a year before the laughter epidemic, caterpillars had shown up. They were breeding and they spread all over the ground. There was this huge infestation. One of the explanations was that the people who got sick had walked across the caterpillar. They stepped on these caterpillars. And had killed them. As a result, the spirit of the caterpillars were possessing them. They started to get this feeling.

Now, she sort of dismissed that as not scientific. But maybe these caterpillars had certain bacterias which affected the brain. Okay, this explanation that there was some sort of bacteria. or virus, I had already checked it out. I'd gone to the government hospital to talk to the medical officer. They'd never found any physical cause for this. They'd never found any medical importance, which was found. I'd even talk to a lab technician.

I'm a laboratory technician who had checked blood samples in 1962. Everything was negative. They'd tested the water supply, the food supply. So that the caterpillar seemed like a dead end. So I tried a different tech. I asked Gertrude, what was going on then at that time in your village? And she thought about it for a while, and then she said, well, of course, there was independence. For 40 years, Tanzania had been a British colony, but in 1961, Tanzania had declared independence.

And this was right before? Just weeks before that first girl started laughing. Gertrude, I don't know much about independence. What can you tell me about independence? What I experienced by then was people going around, singing, little drums, dancing, because they're independent. But apart from that, I can't tell more about independence. Because I was very, very young. Gertrude said that she knew somebody who would remember more, someone I should talk to.

This man, Sospita. The 71-year-old man. Mr. Sosita? Who was assisting the witch doctor? He was the witch doctor's assistant. Maybe this man can help more than I. Do you want some coffee or some breakfast here first? On my very last day in Bacoba,

Raymond and I sat down with this man, witch doctor's assistant, at a restaurant near my hotel. He was a tiny guy, gray hair and big oversized suit, and he filled in some of the missing pieces. Let me tell him I want to know what he remembers. I asked him about the independent celebration that Gertrude described, the ones just before the laughter epidemic.

He painted a very different picture. He was 26 at the time. And after the parties died down, he said change, swept through his village. Immediately following independence, Tanzania became a socialist state, and the new government was out to create a new world order. Land changed hands. They abolished the local clans. The president, president, in the era after the independence.

And the local religions. He banned the spirit. This was the brand new age. This was the new era. You were supposed to have a modern belief system. The entire village was being asked to abandon the way that they had worshipped for thousands of years. Within weeks, the church has moved in. Suddenly they had business.

Catholic Church opened up on one side of the street, now Lutheran on the other. were telling people convincing villagers to join different religions. They even handed out money. It was kind of a bidding war for souls. All of it was too new, too fast. He even remembers this one particular night, that everyone in his village gathered outside and stared at the sky. They had been told you

that was the end of life on earth at midnight everybody was out the whole night waiting to see whether they are going to die he told me we saw the heavens and the moon slamming into each other What they saw it was a eclipse of the moon.

That's what they saw. Looking back on it, maybe that was the end of the world, of that old world. Here's this guy, the switch doctor's assistant, who introduced himself to me actually as an elected official. He made this jump in his life. That was a particular period of time when everybody was making this big jump, all of the sudden. So you think that this laughing epidemic had something to do with like an avalanche of newness? Yeah.

Of all the explanations I came across, this is the one that makes the most sense to me. It's plausible to me too because you've got a loss of religion, an arrival of a new religion, a loss of a political culture, a new leader. That's a very large pile up of change all of a sudden. And, of course, everyone's a little bit scared, so there's a quiet, and then someone starts to laugh. You know, who knows why that first girl went crazy and why she started making crazy laughing noises. But it was like people saw that, and they were like, oh, God, I feel like that, too. It sounds like laughter, but you could think of it as... It's like a collective scream or something.

Yeah. Like the entire society was a 16-year-old girl in 1962. Radio Lab producer, Ellen Horn. Well, that's it for us, at least for now. For more information on the Tanzanian laugh epidemic or anything else you heard in this hour, visit RadioLab.org. I'm Chadaboonrod. And I'm Robert Quilwich.

We'll see you later. Radio Lab is produced by Jada Bowmerrod, Lulu Miller, Rob Christensen, Ellen Horn, Elizabeth Giddens. Production support. Production support by Sally Herships, Sarah Pellegrini, Ariolasky, Heather Radke, Michael Orion McManus, and Soren Reeler. Thanks to Gail Cleaver, Beth Barak, Bingo Knightley, Emily Weber, and Sharon Count. And finally, special thanks to Casey Crum. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR National Public Radio.