https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms7MpUNvAK0 Laughter is contagious. It's fun! Who can help but crack a smile in the presence of a good giggle or guffaw? It's what Hollywood producers count on, cinema screens full of audience members egging each other on to laugh hysterically. What's less fun is when that laughter is actually hysterical, and unstoppable, and genuinely contagious. Which is what happened to the residents of a village on the coast of Lake Victoria in Tanzania. The story goes that the epidemic began in a girls boarding school in Kashasha on the morning of January 30, 1962. Three girls just started giggling all of a sudden, without provocation, and within a few hours they had 95 of the other 195 pupils going too, some of them laughing for a few hours and others cackling non-stop for over two weeks. Two weeks! Anchorman's not even that funny! The school was forced to close on March 18th, and sending those giggling girls home only made matters worse. Like a disease - a hilarious disease - the laughter spread to many of the girls' hometown of Nshamba, with 217 residents having attacks of laughter themselves (mostly schoolchildren or young people). In June it spread to another girls' school, affecting 48 pupils. Eventually the laughter epidemic spread to 14 schools and over 1000 people were affected. Outbreaks of mass hysteria are nothing new. There was the West Bank fainting epidemic in the eighties, where thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women suffered from dizziness and collapses. There are even the historical accounts of the Dancing Plague of 1518, where numerous members of the Roman Empire started boogying uncontrollably, many succumbing to heat stroke and exhaustion. Mass hysteria is the explanation, but it doesn't actually really explain anything. Nobody knows how these things start, or why, or how they spread, or why, or basically anything. It's just a whole bunch of people spontaneously going crazy. It could happen to you!
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/