The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  No community suffered as much as Nshamba, a village southwest of Bukoba. There, according to Rankin and Philip, 217 villagers came down with the ailment after several of the Kashasha schoolgirls returned to their area homes. So, on a rainy African morning with gray clouds hanging low overhead, we roll into Nshamba, a busy community crisscrossed by red dirt roads.

  Since many of the victims were young women, we head off in search of female villagers. We find a group in front of a coffee co-op, kneeling on a tarp and sorting by hand through large mounds of green coffee beans, looking for runts. Yes, they tell us through Rutta, they know of the laughing disease. One of them even suffered from it: the woman in the corner in the brown hairnet. We’re eager to hear more, but the women turn back to their work, ignoring us. We’re flummoxed, until Rutta explains that they’re thirsty. They could use some sodas.

  We catch on. Pete wanders over to a local shop and returns with a crate of Pepsis, Fantas, and Sprites. The women cheer. Once they’ve cracked open their soda-pop bribes with their teeth, they are eager to chat. We sit down with the woman in the brown hairnet, who tells us she came down with the disease in July 1996. She felt a pain in her back and head and then, three days later, lost control of her body—laughing, crying, speaking in strange languages. Only when she was taken to the hospital and given a shot of quinine did she recover.

  This wasn’t omuneepo, says Rutta. It was cerebral malaria. His second brother came down with it, causing him to run around like a maniac until he collapsed in exhaustion.

  Our search through the town continues, past free-range chickens scurrying about and women eyeing us from doorsteps, chewing bits of sugarcane. We learn that the person we should talk to is a woman named Amelia. We’re told she was the first person in Nshamba to come down with the ailment once it was brought here by the schoolgirls. When she recovered she became a healer, treating others with the disease. There’s only one problem: Amelia now lives far away from here, we’re told, in a distant part of the region. And she’s crazy.

  Meanwhile, children have been gathering about us, drawn by the spectacle of the two white guys, apparently not a common sight. As we make our way back to the van, they break out in singing: “Mzungu, eh, eh, eh! Mzungu, eh, eh, eh!” Whether the song’s making fun of us or not, Pete joins in the festivities, jumping about wildly as the small children laugh with glee.

  These children, as young as they are, see the humor in what’s going on here: two mzungus, out of their element, dancing about like maniacs. Laughter develops in infants far earlier than language, usually between just ten and twenty weeks of age. (Aristotle was off when he declared babies begin laughing on their fortieth day.) To be clear, what these babies are laughing at isn’t humor as we understand it; they just find certain stimuli pleasurable. (For those stuck alone with their baby nephew without any idea of what to do with him, take note: according to observational studies of what 150 infants in the first year of life laughed at, kissing the kiddo’s tummy and playing “I’m gonna get you!” are winners. Bouncing the tyke on your knee? Not so much—nor is it very safe.)16

  According to Paul McGhee, who has spent years studying how humor develops, children don’t begin to recognize things as funny until about halfway through age two. That’s when they understand that objects have meanings that can be rearranged in funny ways (like using a banana like a telephone). But that’s not the end of it. According to McGhee, there are still three other developmental humor stages to come. Early in their third year, kids typically start using their developing language skills to mislabel objects, similar to the way I still inanely point to horses I see on long car trips and call them cows, just to piss off my wife, Emily. Then soon after, children grasp conceptual humor, based on the idea that objects have attributes that can be rearranged in an amusing fashion. And by this point, these kids are laughing all the time. Studies of five-year-olds have shown they laugh, on average, 7.7 times per hour, while the average American adult laughs just eighteen times a day.17

  At around seven years, children develop the ability to juggle multiple concepts and meanings in their minds at once, so they finally get the whole shebang: plays on words, double meanings, puns, and complicated jokes.18 Still, children often need several more years under their belts before they fully get the joke behind tricky concepts like irony and satire. That’s not too surprising, considering that sarcasm is often so difficult to grasp, even for adults, that there are efforts afoot to create new forms of punctuation to indicate it. That includes the SarcMark, which looks like an upside-down “e” with an eyeball. This, to us, is a great idea.

  As obvious outsiders in Nshamba, it’s to our advantage to joke and laugh not just with these kids, but with grown-ups here, too. That’s because laughter and humor are powerful social signals, indicating to the world in big, bold letters that things are okay. As sociologist Rose Coser once put it, “Laughter and humor are indeed like an invitation, be it an invitation for dinner, or an invitation to start a conversation: it aims at decreasing social distance.” Humor and laughing are so good at this, so adept at increasing positive feelings and social intimacy, that they seem to operate like a remote control, with someone else’s mind as your personal boob tube. A few years ago, researchers in London had people listen to laughter while an fMRI scanner monitored their brain response. They found that just the sound of chuckling, without any humor at all, was enough to trigger neurons in the part of the brain that controls the muscles for smiling and laughing. Scientists have labeled these cells “mirror neurons,” since they mirror the behavior being observed. Negative sounds, such as screaming and retching, also activated corresponding mirror neurons, but at a weaker level.19

  No wonder the crews of professional laughers we auditioned for in Los Angeles are in such high demand to help get sitcom audiences chuckling. Here was more scientific proof that laughter really is contagious.

  But when you joke or laugh, you do more than just make those around you prone to laughter, too. Because humor helps you come off as less threatening and more socially attractive, it can help convince others, in an almost voodoo-like way, of all sorts of unreasonable things. In one study, people trying to bargain down the price of a landscape painting were willing to accept a higher cost if the person on the other side of the negotiating table cracked, “I’ll throw in my pet frog.”20 In another experiment, people listened to a speech that had been intentionally disorganized, with nearly a third of all sentences rearranged randomly. Those who heard a version that included jokes throughout the discourse rated it more organized than its equally muddled counterpart.21 So now, if we can use humor to convince people in Nshamba that we, a couple of white guys asking odd questions about some half-forgotten mysterious ailment, aren’t up to no good? All the better.

  Discussing our options with Rutta, we decide our best bet is to try to track down this woman Amelia. So we pile into the van, which we’ve renamed the “Hotbox” because of its lack of air-conditioning, and head off into the bush. Deeper and deeper we drive into the backcountry, past verdant stands of banana trees and through rocky, remote valleys. The rain clouds have passed, and the hot African sun beats down on the van. “Welcome to Tanzania,” Rutta cracks as we inch down a treacherous series of switchbacks, the rock-strewn dirt road nearly tearing out our transmission. Every now and then, we come across somebody ambling down the road, and Rutta pauses to ask directions. More often than not, these passersby climb into the vehicle to show us the way. Soon we have the equivalent of a small village crammed into the van, all of whom profess to know where Amelia lives.

  The dirt roads soon regress to little more than rugged trails, spindly tree branches scraping against the sides of the van. “This is the end of the road,” announces Rutta, parking at the end of a dusty footpath flanked by rugged fences of tied-together sticks. At the end of the path, we find an elderly woman in a faded shirt and skirt working in a meager field. She regards us, frowning, and shuffles on bare feet over to a small, mud-walled shac
k. We follow her inside and sit on the ground in the murky, fragrant interior. Yes, she says, her name is Amelia. Yes, she’s from Nshamba. Her dark eyes fix on Rutta alone, hardly acknowledging Pete’s and my presence at all. Her white hair frames a rigid grimace.

  Then Rutta mentions omuneepo. Amelia flinches, startled. “Omuneepo?” she asks, leaning forward. But the moment passes. Her poker face returns. “I don’t know anything about that,” she tells Rutta in Swahili. Rutta doesn’t buy it, pushing her to say more. Fine, she relents. Maybe she had the disease once, as a young woman. “But that was 60 years ago,” she grumbles. She doesn’t remember anything about it.

  But what about what happened after? prompts Rutta. Didn’t she treat people with omuneepo? Yes, she admits, she treated sick people. But she can’t recall what she treated them for. We sit there, dumbfounded, as flies buzz about our heads. Beams of sunlight slice through the dusty gloom, radiating from holes in the walls.

  She’s afraid, Rutta tells us when we step outside for a moment. “In Tanzania, some people are killed if they are practicing witchcraft.”

  Undaunted, we press on. “I was eight years old when there was war between Uganda and Tanzania, and I still remember it,” protests Rutta. We explain to her that Pete’s a university professor, that we’ve heard the rumors about omuneepo and we’re eager to hear the truth.

  But Amelia just shakes her head, making it clear it’s time for us to go. Whatever she knows about omuneepo, she’s taking it with her to the grave.

  Jason Kamala, the principal of the vocational school in Kashasha, recommended we talk to Kroeber Rugeiyamu, Tanzania’s first indigenous psychiatrist. He’s retired now, Kamala told us, and lives not far from the school. So one warm afternoon, we pull up in front of Rugeiyamu’s home, which looks like no other home we’ve seen in Tanzania—or any other house we’ve seen anywhere.

  A tall, sloping cone of rock, concrete, and corrugated metal rises from the earth, like an industrial-strength igloo. The house is a modernized version of the region’s traditional woven-grass huts known as mushonge, we learn from Rugeiyamu, a slight, gray-haired man with a wise smile and bright eyes. “My father was content with his mushonge, but I am a medical man,” says Rugeiyamu, guiding us around his property in a remarkably spry manner, considering he was born in 1928. So, for his mushonge, Rugeiyamu mixed the best of both worlds—the traditions of his homeland and the ideas he adopted while studying medicine in Great Britain. The outhouses out back feature subsoil fertilization systems to feed his banana trees and vanilla vines. In the depths of the hut, past the grain storage area and wood-fired ovens, a dusky library overflows with books—the plays of Shakespeare, a biography of Nelson Mandela, a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. When the tour is over, Rugeiyamu deposits us in the main room of his mushonge, where, surrounded by soaring concrete pillars and a cathedral-like ceiling, we sit on the straw-covered ground and pass around a gourd filled with pungent fermented wine made by locals crushing bananas with their bare feet.

  From his distinctive perspective, from his fusion of the old and the new, Rugeiyamu offers us his take on omuneepo. “It’s hysteria, isn’t it?” he says with a knowing smile, as though this was obvious all along. More specifically, mass hysteria, the spontaneous communal eruption of hysterical symptoms, often a response to stress. According to Rugeiyamu, the Kashasha pupils and other schoolchildren who came down with the laughing disease had lots to be stressed about. “Life was different for the students before they went to school; They had freedom,” he says. “At school, there were strict limits to freedom. And this was a form of expression: the children started laughing. Rather than protesting, they were laughing.”

  This makes sense from what we’ve learned. While the Kashasha school sounds far from ghastly, it was clearly not an easy place to go to school, with its windowless dorms and uncomfortable chairs. And since it was one of the first boarding schools of its kind in the region, the schoolgirls were likely unprepared for the religious-based limits on their largely liberated childhoods. As Rugeiyamu suggests, they had reason to protest.

  While Rugeiyamu didn’t live in this part of the country and didn’t witness the omuneepo outbreak himself, in later years while working for the ministry of health, he was dispatched to other schools where similar symptoms erupted. And always, he says, he found evidence that something was wrong. Serious overcrowding. Poor food quality. A headmistress who had gone AWOL, leaving the school rudderless. “It’s a form of complaint,” he concludes. “They have no alternative form of expression.”

  A few years ago, Christian Hempelmann, a Texas A&M professor of computational linguistics and an avid humor researcher, decided he wasn’t sure about the claim in Provine’s book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation that what happened in Tanganyika in 1962 was an example of the contagiousness of laughter. It just didn’t seem to fit into what we knew about laughter, he told me before our trip. So he scoured the psychological literature available and, in a 2007 article published in HUMOR: The International Journal of Humor Research, he came up with the same conclusion as Rugeiyamu.22

  The evidence to support this theory is compelling. Historical surveys of 140-plus outbreaks of mass hysteria between 1872 and 1993 found that half of all cases occurred in schools just like Kashasha, and the majority of the victims were women—young women, in particular.23

  And laughter, it turns out, has occurred in other cases of mass hysteria, at least the more physical kind known as motor mass hysteria. I learned this when I called Robert Bartholomew, an Australian sociology professor who’s an expert on UFO scares, witchcraft terrors, dance manias, headhunting panics, imaginary air raids, and other bizarre human behavior.24 “With mass motor hysteria, there have long been reports of laughing that go on for long periods of time intermittently,” Bartholomew told me. From his extensive computer databases, he called up a variety of those reports: The Klikushestvo shouting manias of the beleaguered later years of imperial Russia. Outbreaks in strict primary schools in turn-of-the-century Europe. Occurrences amid substandard factory conditions in twentieth-century Singapore. Bouts in a down-and-out Canadian sardine packing plant in 1992. Incidents among Nepalese schoolgirls in 2003. In all these cases, said Bartholomew, “the common denominator was they were under, without a doubt, extreme stress.”

  The fantastical symptoms of omuneepo and other communal manias might seem like something from an exotic time and place. And, sure enough, mass motor hysteria is less common in more modern parts of the world. But that doesn’t mean what happened in Tanganyika can’t still happen right in our own backyard.

  “Have you heard about this thing going on right now in Le Roy?” Latif Nasser, a Harvard grad student researching omuneepo, asked me when I gave him a call. He’s referring to the news that in the New York factory town of Le Roy, high school students were coming down left and right with uncontrollable tics, wild gestures, and crazed outbursts. As in Tanzania, the ailment was primarily striking young women, spreading outward from the most popular in school like some shared secret passing from one girl to the next. Some experts were suggesting mass motor hysteria, possibly due to the stress of growing up in a dead-end town. But many parents rejected the diagnosis, looking for some other cause. Erin Brockovich, the famous environmental legal crusader, even investigated whether the shuttered factories had left behind something horrible in the streams and fields.25 She didn’t find anything.

  It’s the same way as how people here in Tanzania have shirked our questions, or blamed the strange laughter on witchcraft or dead relatives or the unknowable hand of God. It’s sometimes easier to ignore these episodes, or look for a culprit, than to accept them for what they are: a collective cry for help.

  On our last day in Tanzania, Rutta remembers something. He’s heard rumors that at a nearby school, kids had been acting strangely. He suggests we check it out, hopping in the van with more haste and eagerness than we’ve seen all trip. Maybe our obsessive-compulsive tendencies are rubbing off. />
  The school’s principal, a matronly woman in a pink pantsuit named Margaret Shilimpaka, greets us when we arrive. She tells us the co-ed school recently updated its curriculum from home economics to more contemporary, practical skills like hospitality training and food services. Looking around the scattering of modern buildings on a grassy knoll, it’s hard to conceive anything majorly wrong here. But yes, Shilimpaka tells us, her students have been losing control. “There are many,” she declares, eyes widening for emphasis. “They start laughing, crying, ‘I like this, I don’t like this.’ ” She shakes her head. The last two years, she says, have been “very, very bad.”

  We ask to see some of the victims, and she has a teacher fetch the most serious cases. They return with four girls and one boy, all with short-cropped hair and matching gray-and-white school uniforms. They sit quietly, eyeing us curiously, looking like typical high school students. But they’re not, they tell us; something’s been happening to them: shouting and laughing and convulsing in their sleep. Dreaming that somebody is out to get them. Drinking gallons of water at a time, as if they’re dying of thirst. Becoming dizzy and passing out in the middle of the day. Waking up in the night to find they’ve torn off all their clothes. Screaming and clutching at their throats, as if someone were strangling them. Lashing out at those around them, and causing others to turn violent, too.