Society The Strange Case
The Laughter Epidemic of 1962
It started with three schoolgirls by Lake Victoria. Within months, schools had closed and around a thousand people had been caught up in uncontrollable fits of laughing and crying.
[IMAGE: The lakeshore at Bukoba on Lake Victoria, Tanzania] (Bugsinmyfood / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0; opens as a separate document)
On 30 January 1962, at a mission boarding school for girls in the village of Kashasha, on the western shore of Lake Victoria, three students started laughing.
They couldn't stop.
That alone isn't strange. Teenagers get the giggles. But this laughter spread. Within weeks, 95 of the school's 159 pupils had been affected. And it wasn't the joyful kind. Students laughed, then cried, then laughed again, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. Some became restless or violent when restrained. Teachers were unaffected — but they couldn't teach.
On 18 March, the school closed.
That should have been the end of it. It was only the beginning.
The laughter travels
The pupils went home to their villages. And in some of those villages, the laughter followed them.
In Nshamba, a village where several of the girls lived, more than 200 people were affected over the following months, many of them young. Other schools reported outbreaks. Some closed. Some reopened, and then closed again when the laughter returned.
By the time it finally faded, the epidemic had lasted well over a year in some areas. Around 14 schools had been shut down, and an estimated thousand people had been affected.
No one died. But for many families, it was frightening: a mysterious illness that looked like laughter and felt like the opposite.
Looking for a cause
Doctors investigated, as they would for any outbreak. They looked for infection, for poison, for something in the food or water.
They found nothing.
Two doctors, A. M. Rankin and P. J. Philip, documented the epidemic in a 1963 medical paper. Blood tests and examinations came back normal. The pattern of spread didn't fit an infectious disease — it followed social connections, not germs. Adolescents, especially girls, were by far the most affected.
FACT Established by documentary or physical evidence.
How it was classified
Researchers today classify the Tanganyika laughter epidemic as an episode of mass psychogenic illness — sometimes called mass sociogenic illness. That means real physical symptoms spreading through a group by psychological and social means, often during times of stress, rather than through any infection or toxin.
Why there, and why then?
Tanganyika had become independent from Britain only weeks before, in December 1961. It was a period of hope — and of enormous change.
HYPOTHESIS A credible explanation that some experts support, not proven.
Stress and expectation
Linguist and humour researcher Christian Hempelmann, who re-examined the case in 2007, and others have pointed to stress: strict boarding-school routines, high expectations from families and teachers, and the uncertainty of a country remaking itself. In mass psychogenic illness, symptoms tend to appear in groups under strain that lack other outlets.
Not a one-off
Mass psychogenic illness has been documented all over the world, in every era: the dancing epidemics of medieval Europe, fainting outbreaks in schools, mysterious rashes and smells in workplaces. The specific symptoms tend to fit what a culture already believes about illness.
You learned this today!!! YOU LEARNED THIS TODAY !!!
- The Tanganyika laughter epidemic began in January 1962 at a girls' boarding school in Kashasha, near Lake Victoria.
- Episodes of laughing, crying and restlessness could last from a few hours to more than two weeks.
- The school closed in March 1962, and the outbreak spread to villages and other schools — around 14 schools were shut.
- Doctors found no infection or toxin; it is considered a case of mass psychogenic illness.
One more thing
A bolt of lightning can heat the air around it to roughly five times the temperature of the Sun's surface.
→ Read something elseSources & further reading
- Rankin, A. M. & Philip, P. J. An epidemic of laughing in the Bukoba district of Tanganyika, Central African Journal of Medicine, 1963
- Hempelmann, Christian F. The laughter of the 1962 Tanganyika "laughter epidemic", Humor, 2007
- Tanganyika laughter epidemic, Wikipedia
- Bartholomew, Robert E. & Wessely, Simon. Protean nature of mass sociogenic illness, British Journal of Psychiatry, 2002
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