Happening in Clusters

No bout of laughter has to be picked up by each person in sequence for a group process to occur. It does not require everyone first to hear someone else, nor does it require every body to make the same movement. In 1962, a school in Tanganyika saw a mass episode, which later spread to other schools and communities. If, because no clear relay of sound can be found, it is broken into many unrelated individual cases, the scale of what had already happened is missed just the same.

The episodes arrived suddenly. Some brief bouts eased after a few minutes, while others took up several hours; after remission, they could recur. Laughter was the most conspicuous manifestation, but it did not monopolize these spans of time; other episodes took the form of crying. The earliest records came from a girls’ school, and later the affected students included both boys and girls; European and African teachers were not recorded as patients. Sound could have crossed the desks, yet the boundaries of the episodes did not follow the range of hearing. The teachers’ absence therefore constitutes a resistance, but it is still not enough to immediately write age, school pressure, or political conditions into the cause.

A clear relay line would make the matter easier to understand: the first sound draws out the second, and the number of people increases with the sound. What history has left behind, however, is another kind of difficulty. If difference is given too much weight, the events faced by schools and communities are pulled apart; if only the group is seen, laughter speaks on behalf of other bodies. It can be a symptom, but its repeated appearance alone cannot explain how people were drawn in, nor can it compress episodes lasting several hours into a single laugh and the responses of bystanders. Crying is not laughter’s shadow side, still less does it hand over a more credible opposite feeling. It only makes that familiar group portrait unsteady.

Thirty years later, an experiment using recorded laughter repeatedly played back the same sound, and the number of people who reported laughing themselves gradually decreased. The study still invoked the Tanganyika event to show that laughter can continuously infect others or produce social synchrony. In the experiment, laughter gradually faded; in the historical event, however, the number of people was retained, supplying laughter with duration and scale.

This borrowing is tempting. Laughter seems to carry direction within itself: one person laughs, the person beside them laughs too, and relation seems to grow on the surface of sound. Once the number of people increases, the direction seems even more certain, as though one need only arrange many faces back into a route traversed by sound. But returning to 1962, the schools and communities did indeed have to face something happening together, while the scale did not fall neatly onto laughter. No single expression could circle the affected people together from beginning to end, and no single duration could serve as the event’s standard unit. Some people quickly recovered; some went through longer episodes. The episodes that appeared again later also had no prewritten duration or expression. Happening together here is not a group photograph, but a fact that cannot be claimed by a single action.

Time continued to pass: some bodies had already calmed down, while another episode was only just beginning. It might take up only a few minutes, or it might drag on for several hours. The sound most easily heard in the classroom did not forecast what would happen to the next body. When other episodes appeared, the body was not laughing, but crying.