Ha! (3 page)

K
AGERA

Everybody enjoys a good laugh. But what if you started laughing and couldn't make yourself stop?

Our first laughing event occurred in the Kagera region of Tanzania, then called Tanganyika, nestled along the western shores of Lake Victoria. Located six hours from the nearest airport, Kagera seldom makes the news, which is why it's surprising that the site became host to one of history's most unusual epidemics. Sometime on Tuesday, January 30, 1962, three students at a local missionary boarding school for girls started laughing. Then, as they ran into more classmates, their friends started laughing too, the giggling quickly spilling over to nearby classrooms. Because the students weren't separated by age, with younger and older students sharing rooms, it didn't take long for the laughter to spread throughout the entire campus.

Soon, over half the school's occupants were uncontrollably laughing, almost a hundred people in all. And they couldn't stop themselves, no matter how hard they tried. An outbreak was under way.

Though none of the teaching staff—two Europeans and three Africans—were “infected,” the incident quickly overwhelmed the village. Even when adults tried to subdue the laughing girls, the behavior continued. Some students actually became violent. Days passed, then weeks, and when the laughing still hadn't stopped a month and a half later, the school was forced to close. With the students secluded in their homes, the laughter finally settled and the school was able to reopen on May 21, almost four months after the initial outbreak. Then, when 57 of the 159 students became infected with laughter just like before, the doors closed again.

The school wasn't the only location affected, either. Soon after classes were canceled, similar outbreaks broke out in neighboring cities and villages. Apparently, several of the girls, having returned to their nearby homes, brought the laughing sickness with them and infected dozens of others along the way. The epidemic even reached Nshamba, a village of ten thousand people, where it infected hundreds more. No longer confined just to children, the epidemic grew so widespread that the precise number of people affected couldn't even be determined. How could you measure such an event? In total, before the year was over, fourteen schools were shut down and more
than a thousand people were overcome by an uncontrollable case of the giggles.

Eventually, the laughter subsided and the epidemic died out on its own, eighteen months after it started. It was as if, for a brief time, the world saw just how contagious laughter can be. The question remains: Why?

S
TOPOVER AT THE
E
MPIRE
S
TATE
B
UILDING

Our second laughter case study concerns an event that occurred almost fifty years later on the other side of the globe. The location was the New York Friars' Club, just weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and host Jimmy Kimmel was welcoming Gilbert Gottfried to the stage to roast the evening's guest of honor,
Playboy
founder Hugh Hefner. All those before him had avoided any jokes with political or social overtones. Though some referred to the recent tragedy, comments had been short and respectful. Rather than address the prominent topic of the day, they had limited themselves to penis jokes and comments about Hefner's bachelor lifestyle.

Gottfried started his act with a few safe jokes, including one about Hefner needing Viagra. Then he took things a step further, joking that his Muslim name was “Hasn't Been Laid.” The crowd laughed, so Gottfried decided to go for broke.

“I have to leave early tonight. I have to fly out to L.A. I couldn't get a direct flight. I have to make a stop at the Empire State Building.”

A silence followed. People started to feel uneasy, and several people gasped. Then, the room filled with boos.

“Too soon!” audience members cried. What had been a laughing, supportive audience just moments before was now a room full of judgment.

Gottfried paused. As a professional comedian with over twenty years of experience, he could tell that the crowd had turned on him. He had crossed a line. Some performers would have acknowledged the mistake and returned to their safe material. Others might have simply left the stage. Gottfried went in a different direction.

“Okay, a talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in: a man, woman, two kids, their little dog. And so the talent agent asks, ‘What kind of act do you do?'”

I wish I could tell you the rest of the joke. I really do. But there's no way you'll ever see it in print, just as you won't see it in recordings of the roast. The joke's depravity either broke all the cameras or scared Comedy Central so much it burned the tape shortly thereafter. The joke, named for its punch line
The Aristocrats
, involves scatology, violence, and even incest, and though it has been around for decades, it's almost never told in public because it's literally the dirtiest joke in the world. After the setup—that a family walks into a talent agent's office to describe a proposed act—the joke goes on to describe the most obscene performance possible, filled with sex and unspeakable taboo. The punch line, that the performers give their act the very proper title
The Aristocrats
, is less a traditional punch line than an opportunity to share a revolting setup.

Though the audience was wary at first, as the obscenity escalated Gottfried's commitment eventually won them over. Soon the crowd was roaring and many attendees, themselves performers with exceedingly high comedic standards, fell to the floor laughing. By the time the joke was over, some were guffawing so loudly that, as one journalist put it, it sounded as if Gottfried had performed a collective tracheotomy on the audience. The performance was so memorable that someone made a movie about the joke, with Gottfried's performance as the climax, titled
The Aristocrats.
I implore you to look it up if you aren't easily offended.

Gottfried killed the rest of his performance and, at least partly because of that joke, is now considered a New York legend. He's a comedian's comedian, and the joke helped a lot more than just his career, if you take his word for it.

“The only reason America is standing today,” he claimed in an interview many years later, “is because I told that joke at the Hugh Hefner roast.”

T
ITANIC

Our final laughter case study is more personal. Around Christmas of 1997, my wife Laura and I went to see the movie
Titanic
with my parents. It was a stressful time because we had just moved to Boston to start new jobs. But we wanted to see our families for the holidays, so we packed up the pets and drove to Florida to visit my parents, and as often happens when visiting family, by the second day we were already running out of things to do. Agreeing on a movie was difficult, but in the end we didn't have much choice. One film was dominating theaters, with new showings starting nearly every hour. We were about to watch a movie about an iceberg.

I don't mean to give away any spoilers, but there's a scene near the end of
Titanic
where Leonardo DiCaprio is freezing to death next to the sinking ship while Kate Winslet clings to a floating piece of debris. Leo is about to die, Kate has a renewed interest in life, and Kathy Bates is complaining in the distance that
somebody needs to do something!
Over two hours of love story has built up to this moment, and director James Cameron is playing it for all it's worth. As I watched the tragic scene, I turned to look behind me and saw that every person in the audience was crying. Women and men alike were sobbing into their shirt sleeves, including my father who to this day claims he simply ate too many Red Hots.

Then I looked to Laura. She was laughing.

Now, I don't want to make my wife sound insensitive. She cries a lot, or at least a normal amount for a woman her age. She can't even listen to music by Sarah McLachlan because it reminds her of the SPCA's anti-animal-cruelty commercials. But there was something about the ridiculousness of the situation that made her lose control at the movie theater that evening. She tried to hold in her emotions, but the more she struggled to conceal them, the more they burst through. People around us started to become irked, which only made things worse. I asked Laura what was going on.

She waited several seconds before answering.

“Yo, Adrian,” she whispered in my ear, a reference to the line from the
Rocky
movies. Apparently, the scene in front of us had made her think of that love story from Philadelphia, while everyone else was still grieving in the Northern Atlantic. She even slurred her syllables, just like Stallone. Except in the current movie, the characters were slurring because they were freezing to death. In
Rocky,
that was just how they spoke.

My parents were not amused.

My sharing these three incidents may seem a strange way to start a book on humor. After all, only the second one involves a traditional joke (however loosely defined), and as noted, it's so obscene I can't even repeat it here. In Laura's
Titanic
example, only a single person laughed, and everyone nearby thought the behavior both inappropriate and disturbing.

My hope is that, by the end of this book, you will look at humor differently—no longer in terms of jokes but instead as a psychological coping mechanism. This is exactly what the three case studies have in common. In the pages that follow, we'll see why humor, though it takes many different forms, can't be reduced to a single rule or formula. Instead, we must see it as a process of conflict resolution. Sometimes that conflict is internal, as with Laura's breakdown at the movies, and sometimes it's social, as with Gottfried's joke. At other times, as with the children of Kagera, it's a combination of both—the only way to deal with a life in turmoil.

W
HAT
I
S
H
UMOR
?

For many of us humor is synonymous with being funny. Someone who cracks a joke or makes us laugh is considered humorous, and having a sense of humor means being quick to recognize a punch line or share
an amusing anecdote. Yet, closer scrutiny shows that humor isn't always so straightforward. For instance, why are some jokes hilarious to some but grossly offensive to others? Why do villains laugh as they're conquering the world, or children laugh when they're tickled? Why is it (to paraphrase Mel Brooks) that when I fall down a manhole it's funny, but when you do the same thing it's tragic?

To pick a specific example, consider one of the greatest comedies of all time, as judged by the American Film Institute:
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In that movie soldiers are shot, men commit suicide, and the entire world is ultimately destroyed by nuclear war. Yet, it's considered humorous because all the death and destruction are intended to be ironic. The film almost completely lacks traditional jokes, yet the pointlessness and futility it portrays make us laugh because we have no other way to respond.

Under the right circumstances almost anything can make us laugh, which is why humor should be considered a process, not an outlook or a behavior. It results from a battle in our brains between feelings and thoughts—a battle that can be understood only by recognizing what brought the conflict on. To understand why, let's revisit the three scenarios that opened this chapter.

In the first scenario, the outbreak at Kagera, we see an important distinction regarding humor: not everything that makes us laugh is funny. The children who were affected, though laughing on the outside, reported extreme stress—and desperately wanted to stop. One interpretation is that they experienced mass hysteria brought on by the stress of massive social change. The prior December had marked the country's independence from Britain, and the school itself had just abandoned racial segregation, integrating its students at a time of intense cultural sensitivity. Add to this the fact that the students were adolescents, many just entering puberty, and the pressures were immense.

But this doesn't explain: Why
laughter?
History is filled with social and cultural change, yet epidemics like this are rare, and when they do occur the behavior is usually complex. In sixteenth-century Europe, for example, groups of nuns once spontaneously erupted in convulsions
while mimicking the sounds of local animals. Dozens of convents were affected. In one, the occupants uncontrollably meowed like kittens; in another, they barked like dogs. In a convent in Xante, Spain, they bleated like sheep. Scientists agree that stress brought on these outbreaks too—specifically, stress caused by strict religious indoctrination and widespread talk of witchcraft. The nuns had felt so threatened by spiritual possession that they began adopting the very behavior they had been warned against.