February 23, 2023 • 49 mins
What makes people laugh uncontrollably, for hours at a time? Whatever happened to that 'Sweating Sickness,' and why did so many parents in Japan become convinced their children might die if those kids watched a certain Pokemon episode? Tune in as Ben, Noel and Max explore the strange commonalities of past epidemics.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
the Man, the Myth, the legend, mister Max Williams, who
uh yournl, I'm ben yeah and uh we are finally
recording in the same city again. I want to say yes,
(00:50):
it feels good, it feels and hopefully peek behind the curtain, folks.
Hopefully we three will be recording in person sooner rather
than later, as the as the iHeart Podcast office nearest completion.
Very excited about that. Been a long time coming. We've
(01:12):
obviously gotten the hang of this whole remote thing the
new way, but there's something kind of charming and quaint
about being in the same room look at each other
in the I R L eyeballs instead of gazing into
a screen and a smell Oh yeah yeah, boys down together,
(01:34):
yeah yeah. It gradually builds along with the temperature. The
last time we recorded in person together was in the
old I Heart office in the Legendary Stuff you should
know studio, and the Legendary Stuff you should Know Studio
is legendarily small and legendarily not ventilated. I think we
(01:57):
could say, right, it gives you a bit of a
bit of the sweats sometimes, but we do enjoy the energy,
and there's there's sort of this epidemic good vibe that
occurs when when we're in person and we all three
are actually friends outside of the show. This is not
an act. So we do love to hang out together.
(02:19):
We can't wait to record in person and maybe one
day we can get this show on the road and uh,
you know, get it out on its feet in front
of an audience. What do you think. No, I'm into
But for now we can like figuratively get this show
on the road and talk about not just epidemics of
good vibes, but epidemics of like, you know, diseases, bad vibes. Really, yeah,
(02:45):
just so, there are a lot of epidemics throughout the
span of human history, and some of these remain largely
unexplained in the modern day. Fellow ridiculous historians, you'll recall
that not too long ago we talk to about the
dancing plague. I think we had an APPA parody that
came up and with scream I don't remember the twist
(03:11):
and scream Yeah, and this this, this episode today was
originally going to be some kind of bonus plagues if
you will, tacked onto the end of that episode, but
we realized that we had more than enough with the
dancing plague alone to fill out an episode, so we
figured we'd uh stick these to the side and add
a little bit to them. And now here we are
with just some strange and ridiculous plagues throughout history. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:37):
So let's start with one that's close to our top
of the show conversation. Let's talk about sweating sickness and
Cardi sweat star Trek related right, Fortunately, my friend does
not have anything to do with the lu picard. I know,
research the wrong thing again, same same, I was halfway
(04:00):
through what I figured it out, and I texted Patrick
Stewart and you know, he mainly texts back in emoji. Um,
but he seemed amused as well. A little little bald
person emoji, I assume. Yeah, yeah, what do you call it? Bitmoji?
He just discovered bitmoji. He loves them like everybody else's parents. Yeah,
I mean, you know, but here, like the silver lining
(04:22):
here is I'm almost entirely through the entirety of the
Star Trek canon, so soon I'll be able to actually
carry a conversation with Max Williams. And then I'll just
change it to sports. Oh that I can't. That canon
is a bit too tall in order for me. I
don't think I can get through the cannon of all sports. Oh,
I gotta tell you, I can't remember if I sent
(04:44):
us to both of you. Guys. Definitely sent you Max.
Curling is an epidemic in Japan now, Oh they love it.
They love It's all over the place. Um, Curling's huge
in Korea also, And I think everyone agree, and hopefully
you can agree after hearing this, folks, you should prefer
(05:04):
an epidemic of curling to an epidemic of sweating sickness?
What is sweating sickness? Like? I can't believe we didn't
talk about this with the dancing plague. Is it still
kind of inexplicable or is it just a European thing?
What do we know about? Boy? Is it much like Abba?
(05:24):
Although Abba, you know, made its way across the universe,
really took it by storm. I mean they've got like
a Broadway play and everything. This plague did not get
a Broadway musical, unfortunately, or or fortunately it might have
been a bit of a bummer, but this plague was
very specific to England. It was also known as the
(05:44):
English sweat or English sweating sickness, and it is an
epidemic of unknown origin that popped up in England five
different times, and aside from the second of the times,
which was relatively mild, the other four were incredibly severe.
(06:07):
A lot of people lost their lives. It began with
things like headaches and what is being reported in Britannica
as giddiness, which I love, but also not a good
kind of giddiness. I'm imagining this is some sort of
like nervous energy and kind of almost madness, kind of
vertigo too, yeah, yeah, and uh and again. And some
(06:32):
of the sources that Britannica is citing severe prostration, which
would we talked about that recently as well. Prostration being
when you kind of lay on the ground in almost
a fetal position. M yeah. Prostration is lying stretched out
on the ground, specifically with your face facing down, so
(06:55):
it's it's not the most advantageous position, which also kind
of forces the idea of vertigo here and astute listeners,
you may remember that we explored this not too too
long ago in an episode on Henry the eighth and
that English sweat. I remember being in love with that title.
(07:16):
But uh, but this was this is not the same, right,
This is this the same English sweat that Henry the eighth.
This is the very this is the very same we
focused on. We focused on our boy, Henry eighth. But um,
but this was obviously affecting other people. The strange thing
is that this remains a mystery. We know about the symptoms,
(07:39):
and this was not a fun epidemic. It was a
fatal one. And when people got the first symptoms, then
they typically if they were going to die, they would
die in a window of three to eighteen hours, which
is a crazy short time. You know. Yeah, that's right,
And it's interesting too the whole prostration element. Um. You know,
(08:01):
prostration is also something often associated with religious ritual, you know,
to prostrate yourself before God. It's also something that you
see often in Islam with calls to prayer, you know,
on your prayer rug and all of that. Yeah, oh God,
a million percent. So it makes sense that a lot
of these epidemics were associated with some sort of curse
(08:25):
or you know, a vengeful God, you know, the idea
that folks were being forced into these positions, almost like
a Sodom and Gomorrah type attack. You would occasionally, in
addition to those other symptoms that we talked about, get
a pretty nasty rash and um if you if you
did get it, it was not something that you could
(08:48):
then be immune to, which is the folks now it's awful.
And that was kind of, you know, similar to COVID,
where some people, it seemed, were immune after getting it.
But then we all of a sudden, when we didn't
know what the deal was with COVID, we realized that
people were getting it multiple times. So this seems to
be kind of similar, although some people were more resilient
(09:08):
than others. But you gotta wonder too, without any real
scientific research at the time available, if this maybe resulted
from a mutation. Yeah, and this again, this is an
incredibly frightening time for people. We still don't know how
it was transmitted necessarily. There are some theories, but this
(09:31):
seemed to target young men and often target the wealthy
and the powerful, which you can only imagine kind of
added to the idea of it being a divine punishment.
It's strange because the sweating sickness epidemic when it came
in these different waves, it was also particularly short lived.
(09:55):
It would just occur for a few weeks in places
and move on. Also, I had some nicknames that we
would love to share for with you, to the point
about frustration. It was sometimes called the stoop gallant or
gallant and the stoop nave like you scamp like that one,
(10:17):
and much like a curse or you know, biblical type punishment,
might you know be presumed to behave? It vanished and
then came back. By fifteen seventy eight, it was gone
almost entirely, with no evidence left behind of what might
(10:39):
have been its cause. And then over a hundred years later,
we're in France now in the Jean Luke Piccardi region
of France. It's called just a Piccarti region, but presumably
that is where Jean Luke gets his namesake, you know,
perhaps that was his family seat. I don't know, Max,
can you speak to the yeah, the origin story of
(11:02):
the Picard family. I don't know. Ben, where is Chateau Picard?
Do you know? If you have to ask, you're probably
not invited, Yeah, Piccardi. As we're calling it in honor
of our pal or. Picardy is a region in France.
It's Gonnaly, so think of to the north of the country.
(11:25):
It's it used to be its own administrative region or
historical territory, and now it's part of a new region
quite recently since twenty sixteen. Histories closer than it looks
in the rear view mirror. If you go there now,
you might sweat, depending on the weather and your activities,
but you're hopefully not going to get the sweating sickness.
(11:47):
And I can't believe we got this far without mentioning
just how much people were sweating. I wish the English
is so weird. I wish we could say they sweat. Yes,
that's not unfortunately, No, that's a yeah. I liked that
a lot. Uh sweated, Yes they they they sweated, for sure.
(12:10):
We have a guy by the name of Henry Tidy,
which is a great name for a medical expert. At
the time, he was fairly certain that this was that
same historical plague, the sweating sickness or suitor Anglicus. And
then it was kind of, you know, re re rebranded
(12:30):
a little bit to the Piccardi sweat, and this time.
It stuck around well into what we might consider more
relatively modern history until the end of World War One,
with one particularly debilitating outbreak for the population, hitting around
six thousand people in nineteen oh six, and then once again,
(12:54):
like that, it was gone like kaiser SoSE style. And
now we all have to wonder every time we sweat,
is this the beginning of a new English sweat? Uh?
So far the answer is no. But make sure to
stay hydrated, folks, and if you if you feel that
you are being overcome by severe prostration, please do call
(13:18):
a medical expert. Post taste, no doubt. How long was
that between these outbreaks in these two different regions. Hundred
years years? All right, So we're not quite due for
one yet. No, we are. We are so due. We're
passing right now. Yeah, I think we are so fingers crossed.
(13:39):
And like you said, Ben, stay hydrated, stay frosty. So
now let's travel to a different part of the world.
Perhaps what is this I'm just I'm laughing because we're
segueing to laughter epidemic. Oh that's right, yes, yeah, sorry,
that was terrified. I love it. Yeah, that would maybe
what would we can say the giddiness perhaps Um, I'm
(14:02):
going to Tanzania and the year is nineteen sixty two.
So laughter is already this very fascinating thing scientifically, right,
laughter is a language all its own, and sometimes you
can hear laughs and you know that what someone is
(14:25):
trying to communicate is not necessarily just innocuous amusement. Right.
There are evil laughs. There's sesame street laughs like the
count uh and uh. Then there are laughs that sound
like nervous laughter, right, almost like a park Yeah, yeah,
(14:46):
and laughter right whoa, whoa you put that one back
in your laugh sack a laugh sack or yeah, like
the clown laugh. Of course oh u. Laughter can be
a signal of distress. Also, I'm very proud that no
one has heard my real laugh on air because it
sounds frightening. But laughter can. Fake laughs are pretty frightening too.
(15:13):
Benefits fake laugh and fake laughs are pretty easy to detect,
I would imagine for a lot of people. Right. So
it can come from unfunny places. It can come from anger,
unfortunate surprise, sadness. It can be yeah, malevolence, yeah, and
it can come from an epidemic. The most famous example
of this happened back when Tanzania was called Tanganyika in
(15:37):
nineteen sixty two. But the weird thing is, unlike the
sweating sickness, laughter epidemics are still around in the modern day,
and we kind of touch on this and stuff they
don't want you to know. I think a little bit
when we talk about, you know, outbreaks of mass psychogenic events.
That's right, And we talked about that a good bit
(15:58):
as well in our episode on the Dancing plague, where
part of the phenomenon of some of these things might
be that. Again, since we don't have, you know, tests
or like any kind of necessarily scientific data to back
these up, whether or not all of these cases were
in fact infections, or whether it was just kind of
(16:20):
this mass hallucination or kind of like mass group think
kind of copycatting, you know, m yeah, right, and copycatting.
That's an important point because we have to ask ourselves
whether people are just communicating something social right versus something physiological,
(16:41):
something psychological right. And this outbreak in nineteen sixty two,
it occurs at an all girls school and then it
spreads to these other communities. Current estimates say the laughter
epidemic may have affected somewhere around a thousand people and
it lasted for months. This wasn't like the sweating sickness
(17:03):
that only lasted for several hours or would pop up
and then disappear. And we want to shout out an
excellent article by our friends at Atlas Obscura. The nineteen
sixty two laughter epidemic of Tanganika was no joke. Get it.
Shout out to Taotao Holmes. It did have a pattern though,
(17:25):
Like in most cases a mass psychogenic phenomenon, a single
person would be the origin point, right, And this person
in nineteen sixty two was a schoolgirl and they fell
into what experts believe was a fit of anxiety induced laughter.
And then the dominoes started to fall as well, and
(17:47):
other girls started finding themselves laughing against their will, not
in a fun way, uncontrollably. This reminds me a lot
of another episode we did on Stuff that I wanted
you to know about the screaming girls of Malaysia. Yeah,
and I don't know that the video we had wasn't
necessarily the exact instance that we talked about on the show,
(18:08):
if I'm not mistaken, But there is a video you
can find that shows this phenomenon like in full effect.
And it is chilling. Yeah, no one's having fun is
not a pleasant experience. And these students who were who
found themselves affected, weren't just suffering from one bout of
uncontrollable laughter. It would come and it would go, which
(18:32):
is one of the most annoying things about hiccups. If
anybody has ever suffered from hiccups, at which point I
want to stop and ask you, guys, have a good
hiccup cure. Your old roommate Frank is probably the guy
with the most consistent hiccup cure. But yeah, he's like
a hiccup shirt or something. Yeah, he does this move
(18:55):
that's very much a psychological trick where he kind of
gets he puts his hand on the top of your
head and asks you to foot and he sort of
like asks you to almost like funnel your hiccup energy
up through the top of your head and into his hand.
And somehow, yeah, somehow the psychology of that does. I
have seen it work. It's worked on me. I typically
do the old hold your breath for about ten seconds
(19:16):
and then swallow. And you know, a lot of these
remedies are kind of placebo effects. You know, it's not
but but you know, a lot of times the hiccups
have to do with a spasm in your diaphragm, and
if you are able to kind of like relax it
by maybe doing this thing that I'm describing, it can
make it go away. But it also doesn't work every time,
And believing in the cure is almost more important than
(19:40):
the cure itself. Yeah, and this happens with hiccups, of course,
are not psychogenic, right, The hiccup is a spasm of
the diaphragm. But in the case of the laughter epidemic
of nineteen sixty two, we saw that a lot of
attempted cures didn't work because people didn't really understand what
(20:02):
was happening. You would just fall into this bout of
laughter that could last for a few hours, which is
already a very long time to laugh, in my opinion,
not sounding a stick in the mud. And you're laughing
too long. You don't like funnies. It's forty five minutes,
the fun is over. Will return to our regularly scheduled
(20:24):
mirth tomorrow anyway. Yeah, they're laughing for sixteen days. Doesn't
seem fun at that point, it does. It is kind
of like an inescapable bout of hiccups, and people were
running around too. They were very agitated. There was occasional violence,
but no one could figure out what was causing it.
And this is where we have to introduce Christian Hempelman
(20:47):
of Texas A and M University, who's done some pretty
solid work on this. That is correct. Hempelman researched the
incident and described it as a case as we've already
kind of established of mass psychogenic or also known as
sociogenic illness, which oftentimes is linked to very high stress situations,
(21:13):
you know, which certainly applies to schools, you know, where
where the pressure is very high to succeed and to perform,
especially at certain types of maybe you know, this is
an all girls school, and oftentimes those are anytime there
are gendered schools, those usually are kind of high performance,
very academically rigorous settings, wouldn't you say them like boarding schools.
(21:36):
And again there's a different country, so maybe all the
schools are segregated in this way. But in my experience,
you know, when you have an all girls school or
all boys school, they're either some type of reform school
or they are like really highly academically focused institutions. Yeah,
and this is something that Hempelman recognizes, and he says, hey,
(21:58):
there are some social factors that are coming into play
that need to be acknowledged, need to be interrogated a
bit more. And he also points to geopolitical events and
he says, you know, this country is becoming newly independent,
and this independence happens just a month before the laughing epidemic?
(22:23):
Is there a relationship here? And we've got a great
quote from Himpelman where he says, on the one hand,
it sounded too good to be true, and on the
other hand, people were citing it in support of all
kinds of things across the spectrum and contradictory things. So
this caused him to look back at the situation and
(22:44):
ask a surprisingly deep question. He said, what does this
situation tell us about humor? Right? And also he poses
a question that we often see in reports of these
type of events, did this actually happen? All? Of which
I think is an interesting one because this is you know,
this is in the sixties, so presumably the reporting would
(23:06):
be pretty solid. So what do you think he means
when he says did this actually happen? Because we've also
seen you know, situations that are over you know, blown
in the historical record, whether it be a battle or
whether it be you know, some event like this for particular,
maybe reasons associated with the political agenda. So do you
(23:28):
think that's what he's getting at or what do you
think he means when he said did this actually happen?
I get the sense that he is question whether the
story was embellished, right, I think? And I think that's
a fair question to ask because nineteen sixties we've got
mass media, but there can still be a lot of storytelling,
(23:49):
you know what I mean, Just like how when an
historic event occurs, you know, it's just the next year
John F. Kennedy will be assassinated. And as the decade
wound on since that assassination, more and more people started
saying they were there, that they actually witnessed it, far
more people than were actually there. So I think it's
(24:11):
right to question how the extent of this And he's
not being a jerk by asking that, but he was,
you know, he confirmed and multiple people have confirmed that
this laughing epidemic is real. It did occur, There is documentation.
But Hempelmann gets kind of annoyed when people point to
(24:32):
this as evidence of laughter being contagious. He has the
sense that this incident tells us much more about other
stuff and not a lot about humor, because he says,
you know this, we have to look at this laughter
as a nerve symptom, a nerve related symptom of psychogenic illness,
(24:53):
and we have to think about it that way. It
is kind of reductive to say, oh, this is when
contagious laughter goes wrong, so be careful. You know, if
something makes you laugh too long, it's interesting, isn't it.
I mean, the idea we know, we know laughter can
be you know, contagious, but there are a lot of
(25:14):
psychological reasons why that might be the case. You know,
nobody wants to seem like the person that didn't get
the joke. You know. It's a group think kind of mentality,
especially if you're staying a movie, you know, or watching
a movie with friends. I can usually tell when I
truly I mean, I think I know, and then all
three of us know when we truly find something funny.
But the mind is a very tricky beast, and usually
(25:36):
I can tell if I truly believe something that's funny
if I laugh at it. When I'm alone. I laugh
and stuff by myself all the time. And apparently if
you make yourself laugh, well you're just hanging out by yourself.
Apparently that's weird, But I guess that's what we get
for being only children. That's probably true. You even gonna say,
(25:57):
I have a brother that's only a darn't half older
than me. I laugh on myself all the time. So
whoever told you that I I is a full bunk
or we're all, you know, a little strange, or we're
all on our slow boat toward our own laughing epidemic. Yeah.
Implement points out that in these stressful situations, what happens
(26:20):
is people find that they cannot extract themselves from an
environment of constant stress of some sort. And he says
that in this situation, when a person has no power
over that stress, their mind as a difficult time coming
up with an appropriate response. So, again to Himpeleman, you
(26:41):
can identify certain demographics here, he says, quote, such a
person is more commonly young than old, identifying female rather
than male, and they tend to be employees rather than supervisors.
And this has this feeling, this stress, this response has
topress itself somehow, and laughter happens to be one of
(27:04):
the ways that it could come out. At least that's
what I'm getting from his exploration. What do you think?
I agree? And I also think part of his annoyance
with it is in that whole like headline kind of
mentality that we see all the time. Laughing sickness just
sounds cool and creepy. Done that. Yeah, it sounds like
a story arc for the joker. And it's and it's
(27:27):
you know history or you know journalists or whatever it
might be, a story ends or journalist glomming onto the
most relatable and understandable aspect of something that is ultimately
much more complex than just that one thing. Oh no,
are you saying people over simplify history. I think I
am ben. I know that's a hot take. Oh yes,
(27:48):
Reductive reductive reporting, it's a thing. We see it all
the time, and again sometimes it is specifically toward an
agenda of some kind, you know, to to create a
sense of who the victor was or who the bad
guys are the good guys. History is written by the winners,
so check the authors on your textbook. We also know
(28:11):
that mass psychogenic illness in multiple forms may be fairly common.
It's just not often reported under that name, because there's
this idea that you're you're attacking the validity of what's
happening to people, and it really is happening to them,
you know, they're they're not waking up and making the
(28:34):
choice to laugh for hours and hours. There is a
real issue there, and when we talk about, okay, when
we talk about social aspects of epidemics, I think one
example that would surprise a lot of people, definitely surprise
(28:54):
me at least, is something called the Pokemon Shock, which
happened not too long ago in nineteen ninety seven. No,
were you guys Pokemon kids? Uh No, it was a
little past my age set. I didn't really become a
(29:16):
Pokemon kid until I had a kid and then we
started playing like Pokemon cards. But then she kind of
got over that pretty quick. We do have a bunch
of Pokemon cards and it's actually a really fun game.
It's kind of like Magic to Gathering, but like simpler
and more you know, kid friendly, But um, it's cool.
I love you know, I think we all love anime stuff.
(29:38):
And the design and the whole idea of having to
catch them all is interesting because it's sort of a
trap because you can never catch them all because they're
always making new ones. Well, you can try to catch
from all I'm trying to do here in my Pokemon
Gold what you're supposed to be You're so supposed to
be producing this podcast. I can I can multitask. Okay,
(29:59):
Well you remember Pokemon Go though that was an epidemic
on itself. Oh yeah, because we talked about that on
stuff that I want you to know. The company, I
think they're called Nantick were originally some sort of governments
Intel offshoot that then split off and started creating consumer products.
I remember hanging out with hanging out with work buddies
(30:23):
and say no, don't put your phone, don't put your
phone towards me. It was one of those I had
a brief stint of Pokemon Going, and you would say
stuff like, oh no, Ben, you don't understand. It's on
your shoulder, Dude, I got I gotta get it. I'm like, no,
I'm running away. I don't want to be part of this,
no part in this. This isn't specifically referring to Pokemon Go.
This is much earlier than that, Like in the original days,
(30:47):
right when Pokemon, the cartoon and the you know, there
were a lot of video games too, There were a
lot of like, actually, this might even have been earlier
than that. This is in the late nineties, so I'm
having a hard time thinking of the trajector of all
those games like Nintendo DS and all of that stuff
that probably was more in the two thousands. So this
is really ground zero Pokemon days. Yeah, it really took
(31:10):
the country by storm in terms of the cartoon and
the card games. I think was probably the biggest thing.
Oh man. Yeah, and this is for everyone playing along
at home. This is one year after the Olympics come
to Atlanta, Georgian nineteen ninety seven. And a lot of
this is coming to us from an excellent article on
(31:31):
Motherboard via vice. Did Pokemon actually give kids seizures in
the nineties? Shout out to author there, Kaylee Rogers. Kids
are always going to be into flashy, fascinating stuff, and
parents are always going to be concerned about some of
the things that their kids see, even before YouTube became
(31:55):
so ubiquitous, even before social media came into its heyday.
But in nineteen ninety seven, people started to ask, what
if a cartoon can actually hurt my child. And it
was December of that year that an episode of Pokemon
aired in Japan, and apparently tens of thousands of children
(32:18):
watching this experienced seizures, and soon enough people were calling
this the Pokemon Shock. Yeah, so okay, I was sort
of off the mark. The nineteen ninety seven is when
the Pokemon cartoon originated in Japan. The US didn't see, Yeah,
the US didn't see it's Pokemon craze until several years later,
(32:43):
if I'm not mistaken. The franchise was created by Satoshi
Tajiri in nineteen ninety six, and then the cartoon debuted
in nineteen ninety seven and is ongoing with various iterations
and you know, tie ins and video games and all
kinds of different stuff, movies, it's set. But this was
specifically the original Japanese Pokemon craze that we're talking about here.
(33:06):
A yeah, and it's almost you know, it almost didn't
make it to the States because people were worried about
this Pokemon Shock. The idea that children are getting seizures
caused a widespread panic in Japan, where Pokemon is still
very very popular now, and the show went on hiatus
for four months. It almost got canceled, but a guy
(33:28):
named Benjamin Radford, who co authored a study on this,
noted that the story may have become more dangerous than
the actual events, like the folklore of it, the tale
of it may have become scarier than what actually transpired.
And Radford and a co author said this was fascinating.
(33:51):
They thought they could bring something to the table here.
Sir Radford in particular reopens the case out of quote,
just my own curiosity, so I could try to figure
out what happened, and he traces down the exact episode.
It's the thirty eighth episode of season one. Can you
imagine that every British television producer just had a heart attack. Unbelievable. Yeah,
(34:17):
in terms of the length of the season, right right,
you know, a British six episodes made right? What was it?
Sherlock Holmes was three episodes, but they were all like
an hour and a half. Those are like many mini
series and things like that. A lot of times they're
self contained and there won't be very many at all
in a season. But this is much more of an
American you know, phenomenon, but even more so with these cartoons.
(34:41):
Thirty eight the thirty eighth episode of an eighty two
episode long season, and this for something about this episode,
right is what triggered this event um. It aired as
as usual on the evening of December sixteenth, nineteen ninety seven.
The plot is that Ash, who's the young Pokemon trainer
(35:01):
and and his you know, ragtag band of Pokemon uh
get transported into a like I guess it's sort of
like a kind of like a teleportation machine you might
see in like Star trek um and they call it
a Pokemon Transmitter, and they get sent to an alternate
(35:22):
universe that's kind of digitized versions of reality, and then
they have to battle a specific Pokemon, a digital pokemon
um named Porrigon that is being deployed by the villains
of the show, who are the most low key, least malevolent,
bungling villains of any kind of show. You know, they're
(35:43):
always going to lose because they're kind of it's like
Doctor claw in in Inspector Gadget. The stakes are quite low.
Team rockets Um, and they're always trying to get Pikachu.
They want Pikachu so bad. Yeah, there's only Yeah, for
whatever reason, that's the one they're always after. Them. They've
got like a cat that they hang out with talking Pokemon.
They have a pokemon it's a meal that actually talks,
(36:06):
the only one that's such a cool Pokemon they have,
and they're always like, no, we need these other Pokemon
or just like every covetous is what they are. They're
just covetoists, power hungry psychopaths, sociopaths, and they're always pulling
these heist right, and Egon's part of this heist. Yeah.
It's sort of like Pinky in the Brain, where in
every single episode their goal is to take over the world.
(36:26):
The Team Rocket has a singular goal just like that.
So after Ash and Company defeat the Porrigon, that's when
the team I wonder, I wish I could pull up
some images from this episode. I'm imagining it would be
stylized to some degree, this whole digital aspect of it,
So I'm wondering if they used any kind of blocky
pixelae kind of stuff to represent this world, like sort
(36:49):
of bad nineties representations of what the Internet looks like.
Because they are then attacked by an anti virus program,
but Pikachu of course saves the day with his famous
thunderbolt to get it. Electricity, digital world, nice drap Pikachu
very good. He's very very smart, even despite the fact
that he can only say so. Nodder very unclear. For
(37:13):
a lot of these features, I would say I think
they're all pretty gender. Generation two they introduced gender. They do. Okay,
all right, you know Max, I thought Max wasn't paying attention.
I thought he was lost in the Pokemon sauce. But
you're you're, you're here, all right, Yeah, I'm paying attention
to answer the Pokemon question. That has not distinguished whether
or not I've lost in the Pokemon sauce or not.
(37:35):
You have fair point, my friend, fair points. So okay,
here's where the poke rubber hits the poke road. The
animators want to style on this a little bit. It's
your point all about it being a digital world, and
so they use a technique that they call paca PoCA
and this is a this is a process wherein true
(37:55):
colors flash rapidly on the screen. They're red and blue.
Flash is right, We're all thinking epilepsy at this point,
are Yeah, twelve flashes per second for about six seconds,
and you know we epilepsies absolutely something that can be
triggered by flashing lights. Well, nowadays, there's warnings, there's trigger
(38:18):
warnings for anything, like I just recently saw the new
movie from Brandon Cronenberg, Infinity Pool, and it uses all
in camera and practical effects entirely, and there is a
scene that there's like a transformation of one of the
characters that is incredibly strobe. And the same with I
think the most recent Incredibles movie, there was a sign
(38:40):
before you even bought tickets, letting you know, and I
have to imagine that that is largely we have this
event to thank for that kind of thoughtfulness, you know,
in terms of like making sure that everyone has a
good time. There's some people I know that have that
are triggered by these types of flashes, that just can't
go to concerts for fear that there might be some
(39:00):
sequence of lights that might bring on an attack, right,
and it might be something that a venue doesn't think
is extreme enough to warrant heads up, but it can
still affect people with photosensitive epilepsy. And this is what
parents are worried about. This is what a lot of
people in the Japanese public are concerned with because they think,
(39:22):
you know, at the very end of a show their
kid loves, their kid might get a seizure due to
this visual effect. But if you look at the reports
and you see some discrepancies. The reports suggested or implied
that up to twelve thousand kids experienced dizziness, blurred vision,
and convulsions after watching this episode of the show. But
(39:47):
about one and one hundred people have epilepsy, and only
three percent of those one and one hundred people have
photosensitive epilepsy specifically. That's right, So it's not you know,
one size fits all type situation. Um, that rate is
a little bit higher in uh, in young children. But uh,
(40:09):
these reports that were talking about suggested that ten times
as many people had uh photosensitive epilepsy as might have
been expected. Um, so perhaps this is a regional thing.
It's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's a little bit unclear,
right then, I mean the question then becomes, our Japanese
(40:29):
kids more susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy? Is there a higher
number that that sort of you know, uh kind of
bucks the trend. I guess, right, that's the greater trend
of of just human beings. Or is there something else
at play here? Right? Right? Max You've got a great
note about the numbers here where where you you said, look,
(40:54):
using these percentages as as we understand them, now, forty
million children would have to watch this show, and they
would only be watching it in Japan, right or primarily
watching it in Japan. And for another new here, in
nineteen ninety seven, the population of Japan was just a
little over one hundred and twenty six million, So this
(41:15):
would be an incredible, a preposterous number of children, right right,
Like you know, if we if we want to try
to like eliminate variables or possible things, we can kind
of eliminate like, was it just a ridiculous number of
people watched this episode? But it's like no, it's like
the amount of people who would have to watch this
episode for this normal percentages to make sense for the
(41:38):
amount of people who got sick just don't line up. Yeah,
but the damage has been done. People were worried, you know,
and they're your kids, you don't want they're someone's kids.
In general, people don't like bad stuff to happen to
children because in general people are decent. At least call
me an optimist, but that's what I would learn opt
(41:59):
to believe thank you, thank you. It's it's a struggle.
I'm a nihilistic optimist. You're an optimist, thank you, Max
an optimist Prime. Oh chucks, you guys, you guys, I
didn't even get you anything today. But call me you're
a megatron exactly, I'll be your huckleberry. But hey, the question, so,
(42:19):
what is the issue here? How could this be something
similar to the kind of copycat mentality that we've been describing,
you know that would require people physically seeing others exhibiting
these symptoms. If if these kids are watching this show
in their own private homes, they wouldn't know what was
(42:40):
happening with the other kids watching the show in their
own private homes. Right, Yeah, And this is where Radford
goes into the psychogenic aspect, just like the laughing epidemic,
and he's saying, look, it's possibly a self produced physical reaction.
People have been convinced by these external influences. You know.
(43:04):
Another thing that makes at least in my experience, another
thing that kids really love is getting access to stuff
they're not supposed to get access to. Right, So, how
much cooler did that episode of Pokemon become when someone said, hey,
you can't watch this show anymore. And so now you're
(43:24):
a kid, You've heard the stories, right, and you sneak,
you somehow sneak inter viewing, and you are so certain
that something will happen to you, that the reaction occurs
or some kind of some kind of reaction and curse.
And again, like any psychogenetic phenomenon, this does not mean
(43:45):
people are faking it. They're not making it up. By
and large, the symptoms are real. It's just they may
be happening due to some other cause. And with this,
we realize that we started digging in these into these stories,
and we discovered this larger phenomenon, and we still have
(44:07):
more that we want to explore. So this is going
to be we talked to area, this is going to
be a recurring thing for us. There's so many strange
historical tales of epidemics from human civilization that have a
lot of these commonalities. For now, nol Max, it sounds
like we're gonna we're gonna call this a day. And
(44:29):
I hope that this episode does not itself become the
cause of an epidemic, or maybe if it's a good epidemic.
Epidemics are never good, right, No, they are not. I
do kind of want to just toss the stand here
at the end, because I was thinking about this when
we're going through Pokemon's shock. But it's like, I haven't
having problems with my skin like allergic reactions. And so
(44:50):
one of these things my doctor has me doing now
is reintroducing things that like like basically try to eliminate
them as being a potential allergen. And so this weekend
I treat us for the first time in a long time,
and I'll tell you right afterwards, for about the next hour,
I thought I was having an allergic breakout, and then
I went and did something and I was fine. And
(45:10):
so it shows what like, you know, are what we
can be like with situations like this, the power of suggestion, right,
because the mind is an amazing and often misunderstood phenomenon itself.
So we hope you enjoyed this exploration of epidemics. We
(45:31):
are going to be back with some more, including things
like well, without spoiling it too much, we're gonna get
to Koro at some point, and we can't wait for
you to join us on that journey. In the meantime,
Noll you think we got a Disney related episode in
the future. Maybe, Oh my god, Yeah, that's a really
good point because when we were talking to our buddies
(45:52):
over at my Mama told you for a segment that
should be coming out before long with the stuff that
I want you to know, Crew, Matt, myself and you've been.
They were asking all these questions about Disney where I
just returned from. One of them being is it true
that at Disney no one can actually ever die there
because if you die there, they remove your corpse and
(46:12):
basically just trundle you out in the front door through
a series of secret tunnels. So while this might be
a bit of maybe this is a crossover episode where
we have Matt on and talk about some Disney history
kind of conspiracies that are a little more lighthearted, maybe
something more in the ridiculous history vein because those parks
at this point, I mean, Disney parks are fifty years
(46:36):
old at this point, this is the fiftieth anniversary, and
they've repurposed so many things. They've rebuilt things, they've replicated things.
I mean, there really is some interesting history to the
Disney theme parks and of themselves outside of just the
larger company, not to mention. I don't know if you
guys know this, you probably do. But finally, Mickey Mouse
(46:58):
is about to officially be in the public domain because Disney. Yeah,
it's happening. Disney is if anyone has followed this for
a long time, the Disney, the Walt Disney Company, has
single handedly been responsible for significant changes in laws surrounding
intellectual property and trademark. And they, you know, we're able
(47:19):
to continuously extend the Mickey Mouse character, you know, extend
that copywriter trade. I'm maybe confusing the two, but the
point is things are supposed to enter the public domain
after one hundred years or so. For example, Winnie the
Pooh just did. And you'll notice there is a slasher
movie called Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey that is
(47:41):
a direct result of that character entering the public domain.
And that could soon happen with the Mouse himself in
twenty twenty four, depending on what Disney, what the Mouse's
lawyers do, Mickey what a journey. Mickey's also you know,
well established in pan h So we'll see how this
(48:03):
affects We'll see how this affects America's favorite mouse. They're
potentially saying that the that the um did that Mickey
will be replaced by the Purple Dragon figment, as as
the mascot of the Disney parks. At the very least,
Disney's characters a lot of changes that didn't age well,
(48:24):
you know, Song of the South, etc. So we have
definitely got an episode or more on Disney that's going
to be coming your way. Folks. We can't wait for
you to join us and stay tuned for some of
our future episodes. We have some guests coming on. We
don't want to spoil too much, but you're in for
(48:44):
some wild rides in the meantime. Speaking of wild rides,
thanks to our pal Alex Williams for this amazing soundtrack.
Thanks to our research associate and superproducer Max Williams. Thanks
to Disney, Thanks to Japan Noel, Thanks to you. I
really now I'm in my head about it. I really
hope that we are never responsible for an epidemic. Oh yeah, me,
(49:06):
I don't want to be patient zero or one, you
know two? Uh yeah, No, it's it's it's a very
it's a it's a heavy burden to carry. It's heavy,
heavy waste the crown. Oh man, what a day we'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from my
(49:32):
Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's hear it for our super producer,
the Man, the Myth, the legend, mister Max Williams, who
uh yournl, I'm ben yeah and uh we are finally
recording in the same city again. I want to say yes,
(00:50):
it feels good, it feels and hopefully peek behind the curtain, folks.
Hopefully we three will be recording in person sooner rather
than later, as the as the iHeart Podcast office nearest completion.
Very excited about that. Been a long time coming. We've
(01:12):
obviously gotten the hang of this whole remote thing the
new way, but there's something kind of charming and quaint
about being in the same room look at each other
in the I R L eyeballs instead of gazing into
a screen and a smell Oh yeah yeah, boys down together,
(01:34):
yeah yeah. It gradually builds along with the temperature. The
last time we recorded in person together was in the
old I Heart office in the Legendary Stuff you should
know studio, and the Legendary Stuff you should Know Studio
is legendarily small and legendarily not ventilated. I think we
(01:57):
could say, right, it gives you a bit of a
bit of the sweats sometimes, but we do enjoy the energy,
and there's there's sort of this epidemic good vibe that
occurs when when we're in person and we all three
are actually friends outside of the show. This is not
an act. So we do love to hang out together.
(02:19):
We can't wait to record in person and maybe one
day we can get this show on the road and uh,
you know, get it out on its feet in front
of an audience. What do you think. No, I'm into
But for now we can like figuratively get this show
on the road and talk about not just epidemics of
good vibes, but epidemics of like, you know, diseases, bad vibes. Really, yeah,
(02:45):
just so, there are a lot of epidemics throughout the
span of human history, and some of these remain largely
unexplained in the modern day. Fellow ridiculous historians, you'll recall
that not too long ago we talk to about the
dancing plague. I think we had an APPA parody that
came up and with scream I don't remember the twist
(03:11):
and scream Yeah, and this this, this episode today was
originally going to be some kind of bonus plagues if
you will, tacked onto the end of that episode, but
we realized that we had more than enough with the
dancing plague alone to fill out an episode, so we
figured we'd uh stick these to the side and add
a little bit to them. And now here we are
with just some strange and ridiculous plagues throughout history. Yeah. Yeah,
(03:37):
So let's start with one that's close to our top
of the show conversation. Let's talk about sweating sickness and
Cardi sweat star Trek related right, Fortunately, my friend does
not have anything to do with the lu picard. I know,
research the wrong thing again, same same, I was halfway
(04:00):
through what I figured it out, and I texted Patrick
Stewart and you know, he mainly texts back in emoji. Um,
but he seemed amused as well. A little little bald
person emoji, I assume. Yeah, yeah, what do you call it? Bitmoji?
He just discovered bitmoji. He loves them like everybody else's parents. Yeah,
I mean, you know, but here, like the silver lining
(04:22):
here is I'm almost entirely through the entirety of the
Star Trek canon, so soon I'll be able to actually
carry a conversation with Max Williams. And then I'll just
change it to sports. Oh that I can't. That canon
is a bit too tall in order for me. I
don't think I can get through the cannon of all sports. Oh,
I gotta tell you, I can't remember if I sent
(04:44):
us to both of you. Guys. Definitely sent you Max.
Curling is an epidemic in Japan now, Oh they love it.
They love It's all over the place. Um, Curling's huge
in Korea also, And I think everyone agree, and hopefully
you can agree after hearing this, folks, you should prefer
(05:04):
an epidemic of curling to an epidemic of sweating sickness?
What is sweating sickness? Like? I can't believe we didn't
talk about this with the dancing plague. Is it still
kind of inexplicable or is it just a European thing?
What do we know about? Boy? Is it much like Abba?
(05:24):
Although Abba, you know, made its way across the universe,
really took it by storm. I mean they've got like
a Broadway play and everything. This plague did not get
a Broadway musical, unfortunately, or or fortunately it might have
been a bit of a bummer, but this plague was
very specific to England. It was also known as the
(05:44):
English sweat or English sweating sickness, and it is an
epidemic of unknown origin that popped up in England five
different times, and aside from the second of the times,
which was relatively mild, the other four were incredibly severe.
(06:07):
A lot of people lost their lives. It began with
things like headaches and what is being reported in Britannica
as giddiness, which I love, but also not a good
kind of giddiness. I'm imagining this is some sort of
like nervous energy and kind of almost madness, kind of
vertigo too, yeah, yeah, and uh and again. And some
(06:32):
of the sources that Britannica is citing severe prostration, which
would we talked about that recently as well. Prostration being
when you kind of lay on the ground in almost
a fetal position. M yeah. Prostration is lying stretched out
on the ground, specifically with your face facing down, so
(06:55):
it's it's not the most advantageous position, which also kind
of forces the idea of vertigo here and astute listeners,
you may remember that we explored this not too too
long ago in an episode on Henry the eighth and
that English sweat. I remember being in love with that title.
(07:16):
But uh, but this was this is not the same, right,
This is this the same English sweat that Henry the eighth.
This is the very this is the very same we
focused on. We focused on our boy, Henry eighth. But um,
but this was obviously affecting other people. The strange thing
is that this remains a mystery. We know about the symptoms,
(07:39):
and this was not a fun epidemic. It was a
fatal one. And when people got the first symptoms, then
they typically if they were going to die, they would
die in a window of three to eighteen hours, which
is a crazy short time. You know. Yeah, that's right,
And it's interesting too the whole prostration element. Um. You know,
(08:01):
prostration is also something often associated with religious ritual, you know,
to prostrate yourself before God. It's also something that you
see often in Islam with calls to prayer, you know,
on your prayer rug and all of that. Yeah, oh God,
a million percent. So it makes sense that a lot
of these epidemics were associated with some sort of curse
(08:25):
or you know, a vengeful God, you know, the idea
that folks were being forced into these positions, almost like
a Sodom and Gomorrah type attack. You would occasionally, in
addition to those other symptoms that we talked about, get
a pretty nasty rash and um if you if you
did get it, it was not something that you could
(08:48):
then be immune to, which is the folks now it's awful.
And that was kind of, you know, similar to COVID,
where some people, it seemed, were immune after getting it.
But then we all of a sudden, when we didn't
know what the deal was with COVID, we realized that
people were getting it multiple times. So this seems to
be kind of similar, although some people were more resilient
(09:08):
than others. But you gotta wonder too, without any real
scientific research at the time available, if this maybe resulted
from a mutation. Yeah, and this again, this is an
incredibly frightening time for people. We still don't know how
it was transmitted necessarily. There are some theories, but this
(09:31):
seemed to target young men and often target the wealthy
and the powerful, which you can only imagine kind of
added to the idea of it being a divine punishment.
It's strange because the sweating sickness epidemic when it came
in these different waves, it was also particularly short lived.
(09:55):
It would just occur for a few weeks in places
and move on. Also, I had some nicknames that we
would love to share for with you, to the point
about frustration. It was sometimes called the stoop gallant or
gallant and the stoop nave like you scamp like that one,
(10:17):
and much like a curse or you know, biblical type punishment,
might you know be presumed to behave? It vanished and
then came back. By fifteen seventy eight, it was gone
almost entirely, with no evidence left behind of what might
(10:39):
have been its cause. And then over a hundred years later,
we're in France now in the Jean Luke Piccardi region
of France. It's called just a Piccarti region, but presumably
that is where Jean Luke gets his namesake, you know,
perhaps that was his family seat. I don't know, Max,
can you speak to the yeah, the origin story of
(11:02):
the Picard family. I don't know. Ben, where is Chateau Picard?
Do you know? If you have to ask, you're probably
not invited, Yeah, Piccardi. As we're calling it in honor
of our pal or. Picardy is a region in France.
It's Gonnaly, so think of to the north of the country.
(11:25):
It's it used to be its own administrative region or
historical territory, and now it's part of a new region
quite recently since twenty sixteen. Histories closer than it looks
in the rear view mirror. If you go there now,
you might sweat, depending on the weather and your activities,
but you're hopefully not going to get the sweating sickness.
(11:47):
And I can't believe we got this far without mentioning
just how much people were sweating. I wish the English
is so weird. I wish we could say they sweat. Yes,
that's not unfortunately, No, that's a yeah. I liked that
a lot. Uh sweated, Yes they they they sweated, for sure.
(12:10):
We have a guy by the name of Henry Tidy,
which is a great name for a medical expert. At
the time, he was fairly certain that this was that
same historical plague, the sweating sickness or suitor Anglicus. And
then it was kind of, you know, re re rebranded
(12:30):
a little bit to the Piccardi sweat, and this time.
It stuck around well into what we might consider more
relatively modern history until the end of World War One,
with one particularly debilitating outbreak for the population, hitting around
six thousand people in nineteen oh six, and then once again,
(12:54):
like that, it was gone like kaiser SoSE style. And
now we all have to wonder every time we sweat,
is this the beginning of a new English sweat? Uh?
So far the answer is no. But make sure to
stay hydrated, folks, and if you if you feel that
you are being overcome by severe prostration, please do call
(13:18):
a medical expert. Post taste, no doubt. How long was
that between these outbreaks in these two different regions. Hundred
years years? All right, So we're not quite due for
one yet. No, we are. We are so due. We're
passing right now. Yeah, I think we are so fingers crossed.
(13:39):
And like you said, Ben, stay hydrated, stay frosty. So
now let's travel to a different part of the world.
Perhaps what is this I'm just I'm laughing because we're
segueing to laughter epidemic. Oh that's right, yes, yeah, sorry,
that was terrified. I love it. Yeah, that would maybe
what would we can say the giddiness perhaps Um, I'm
(14:02):
going to Tanzania and the year is nineteen sixty two.
So laughter is already this very fascinating thing scientifically, right,
laughter is a language all its own, and sometimes you
can hear laughs and you know that what someone is
(14:25):
trying to communicate is not necessarily just innocuous amusement. Right.
There are evil laughs. There's sesame street laughs like the
count uh and uh. Then there are laughs that sound
like nervous laughter, right, almost like a park Yeah, yeah,
(14:46):
and laughter right whoa, whoa you put that one back
in your laugh sack a laugh sack or yeah, like
the clown laugh. Of course oh u. Laughter can be
a signal of distress. Also, I'm very proud that no
one has heard my real laugh on air because it
sounds frightening. But laughter can. Fake laughs are pretty frightening too.
(15:13):
Benefits fake laugh and fake laughs are pretty easy to detect,
I would imagine for a lot of people. Right. So
it can come from unfunny places. It can come from anger,
unfortunate surprise, sadness. It can be yeah, malevolence, yeah, and
it can come from an epidemic. The most famous example
of this happened back when Tanzania was called Tanganyika in
(15:37):
nineteen sixty two. But the weird thing is, unlike the
sweating sickness, laughter epidemics are still around in the modern day,
and we kind of touch on this and stuff they
don't want you to know. I think a little bit
when we talk about, you know, outbreaks of mass psychogenic events.
That's right, And we talked about that a good bit
(15:58):
as well in our episode on the Dancing plague, where
part of the phenomenon of some of these things might
be that. Again, since we don't have, you know, tests
or like any kind of necessarily scientific data to back
these up, whether or not all of these cases were
in fact infections, or whether it was just kind of
(16:20):
this mass hallucination or kind of like mass group think
kind of copycatting, you know, m yeah, right, and copycatting.
That's an important point because we have to ask ourselves
whether people are just communicating something social right versus something physiological,
(16:41):
something psychological right. And this outbreak in nineteen sixty two,
it occurs at an all girls school and then it
spreads to these other communities. Current estimates say the laughter
epidemic may have affected somewhere around a thousand people and
it lasted for months. This wasn't like the sweating sickness
(17:03):
that only lasted for several hours or would pop up
and then disappear. And we want to shout out an
excellent article by our friends at Atlas Obscura. The nineteen
sixty two laughter epidemic of Tanganika was no joke. Get it.
Shout out to Taotao Holmes. It did have a pattern though,
(17:25):
Like in most cases a mass psychogenic phenomenon, a single
person would be the origin point, right, And this person
in nineteen sixty two was a schoolgirl and they fell
into what experts believe was a fit of anxiety induced laughter.
And then the dominoes started to fall as well, and
(17:47):
other girls started finding themselves laughing against their will, not
in a fun way, uncontrollably. This reminds me a lot
of another episode we did on Stuff that I wanted
you to know about the screaming girls of Malaysia. Yeah,
and I don't know that the video we had wasn't
necessarily the exact instance that we talked about on the show,
(18:08):
if I'm not mistaken, But there is a video you
can find that shows this phenomenon like in full effect.
And it is chilling. Yeah, no one's having fun is
not a pleasant experience. And these students who were who
found themselves affected, weren't just suffering from one bout of
uncontrollable laughter. It would come and it would go, which
(18:32):
is one of the most annoying things about hiccups. If
anybody has ever suffered from hiccups, at which point I
want to stop and ask you, guys, have a good
hiccup cure. Your old roommate Frank is probably the guy
with the most consistent hiccup cure. But yeah, he's like
a hiccup shirt or something. Yeah, he does this move
(18:55):
that's very much a psychological trick where he kind of
gets he puts his hand on the top of your
head and asks you to foot and he sort of
like asks you to almost like funnel your hiccup energy
up through the top of your head and into his hand.
And somehow, yeah, somehow the psychology of that does. I
have seen it work. It's worked on me. I typically
do the old hold your breath for about ten seconds
(19:16):
and then swallow. And you know, a lot of these
remedies are kind of placebo effects. You know, it's not
but but you know, a lot of times the hiccups
have to do with a spasm in your diaphragm, and
if you are able to kind of like relax it
by maybe doing this thing that I'm describing, it can
make it go away. But it also doesn't work every time,
And believing in the cure is almost more important than
(19:40):
the cure itself. Yeah, and this happens with hiccups, of course,
are not psychogenic, right, The hiccup is a spasm of
the diaphragm. But in the case of the laughter epidemic
of nineteen sixty two, we saw that a lot of
attempted cures didn't work because people didn't really understand what
(20:02):
was happening. You would just fall into this bout of
laughter that could last for a few hours, which is
already a very long time to laugh, in my opinion,
not sounding a stick in the mud. And you're laughing
too long. You don't like funnies. It's forty five minutes,
the fun is over. Will return to our regularly scheduled
(20:24):
mirth tomorrow anyway. Yeah, they're laughing for sixteen days. Doesn't
seem fun at that point, it does. It is kind
of like an inescapable bout of hiccups, and people were
running around too. They were very agitated. There was occasional violence,
but no one could figure out what was causing it.
And this is where we have to introduce Christian Hempelman
(20:47):
of Texas A and M University, who's done some pretty
solid work on this. That is correct. Hempelman researched the
incident and described it as a case as we've already
kind of established of mass psychogenic or also known as
sociogenic illness, which oftentimes is linked to very high stress situations,
(21:13):
you know, which certainly applies to schools, you know, where
where the pressure is very high to succeed and to perform,
especially at certain types of maybe you know, this is
an all girls school, and oftentimes those are anytime there
are gendered schools, those usually are kind of high performance,
very academically rigorous settings, wouldn't you say them like boarding schools.
(21:36):
And again there's a different country, so maybe all the
schools are segregated in this way. But in my experience,
you know, when you have an all girls school or
all boys school, they're either some type of reform school
or they are like really highly academically focused institutions. Yeah,
and this is something that Hempelman recognizes, and he says, hey,
(21:58):
there are some social factors that are coming into play
that need to be acknowledged, need to be interrogated a
bit more. And he also points to geopolitical events and
he says, you know, this country is becoming newly independent,
and this independence happens just a month before the laughing epidemic?
(22:23):
Is there a relationship here? And we've got a great
quote from Himpelman where he says, on the one hand,
it sounded too good to be true, and on the
other hand, people were citing it in support of all
kinds of things across the spectrum and contradictory things. So
this caused him to look back at the situation and
(22:44):
ask a surprisingly deep question. He said, what does this
situation tell us about humor? Right? And also he poses
a question that we often see in reports of these
type of events, did this actually happen? All? Of which
I think is an interesting one because this is you know,
this is in the sixties, so presumably the reporting would
(23:06):
be pretty solid. So what do you think he means
when he says did this actually happen? Because we've also
seen you know, situations that are over you know, blown
in the historical record, whether it be a battle or
whether it be you know, some event like this for particular,
maybe reasons associated with the political agenda. So do you
(23:28):
think that's what he's getting at or what do you
think he means when he said did this actually happen?
I get the sense that he is question whether the
story was embellished, right, I think? And I think that's
a fair question to ask because nineteen sixties we've got
mass media, but there can still be a lot of storytelling,
(23:49):
you know what I mean, Just like how when an
historic event occurs, you know, it's just the next year
John F. Kennedy will be assassinated. And as the decade
wound on since that assassination, more and more people started
saying they were there, that they actually witnessed it, far
more people than were actually there. So I think it's
(24:11):
right to question how the extent of this And he's
not being a jerk by asking that, but he was,
you know, he confirmed and multiple people have confirmed that
this laughing epidemic is real. It did occur, There is documentation.
But Hempelmann gets kind of annoyed when people point to
(24:32):
this as evidence of laughter being contagious. He has the
sense that this incident tells us much more about other
stuff and not a lot about humor, because he says,
you know this, we have to look at this laughter
as a nerve symptom, a nerve related symptom of psychogenic illness,
(24:53):
and we have to think about it that way. It
is kind of reductive to say, oh, this is when
contagious laughter goes wrong, so be careful. You know, if
something makes you laugh too long, it's interesting, isn't it.
I mean, the idea we know, we know laughter can
be you know, contagious, but there are a lot of
(25:14):
psychological reasons why that might be the case. You know,
nobody wants to seem like the person that didn't get
the joke. You know. It's a group think kind of mentality,
especially if you're staying a movie, you know, or watching
a movie with friends. I can usually tell when I
truly I mean, I think I know, and then all
three of us know when we truly find something funny.
But the mind is a very tricky beast, and usually
(25:36):
I can tell if I truly believe something that's funny
if I laugh at it. When I'm alone. I laugh
and stuff by myself all the time. And apparently if
you make yourself laugh, well you're just hanging out by yourself.
Apparently that's weird, But I guess that's what we get
for being only children. That's probably true. You even gonna say,
(25:57):
I have a brother that's only a darn't half older
than me. I laugh on myself all the time. So
whoever told you that I I is a full bunk
or we're all, you know, a little strange, or we're
all on our slow boat toward our own laughing epidemic. Yeah.
Implement points out that in these stressful situations, what happens
(26:20):
is people find that they cannot extract themselves from an
environment of constant stress of some sort. And he says
that in this situation, when a person has no power
over that stress, their mind as a difficult time coming
up with an appropriate response. So, again to Himpeleman, you
(26:41):
can identify certain demographics here, he says, quote, such a
person is more commonly young than old, identifying female rather
than male, and they tend to be employees rather than supervisors.
And this has this feeling, this stress, this response has
topress itself somehow, and laughter happens to be one of
(27:04):
the ways that it could come out. At least that's
what I'm getting from his exploration. What do you think?
I agree? And I also think part of his annoyance
with it is in that whole like headline kind of
mentality that we see all the time. Laughing sickness just
sounds cool and creepy. Done that. Yeah, it sounds like
a story arc for the joker. And it's and it's
(27:27):
you know history or you know journalists or whatever it
might be, a story ends or journalist glomming onto the
most relatable and understandable aspect of something that is ultimately
much more complex than just that one thing. Oh no,
are you saying people over simplify history. I think I
am ben. I know that's a hot take. Oh yes,
(27:48):
Reductive reductive reporting, it's a thing. We see it all
the time, and again sometimes it is specifically toward an
agenda of some kind, you know, to to create a
sense of who the victor was or who the bad
guys are the good guys. History is written by the winners,
so check the authors on your textbook. We also know
(28:11):
that mass psychogenic illness in multiple forms may be fairly common.
It's just not often reported under that name, because there's
this idea that you're you're attacking the validity of what's
happening to people, and it really is happening to them,
you know, they're they're not waking up and making the
(28:34):
choice to laugh for hours and hours. There is a
real issue there, and when we talk about, okay, when
we talk about social aspects of epidemics, I think one
example that would surprise a lot of people, definitely surprise
(28:54):
me at least, is something called the Pokemon Shock, which
happened not too long ago in nineteen ninety seven. No,
were you guys Pokemon kids? Uh No, it was a
little past my age set. I didn't really become a
(29:16):
Pokemon kid until I had a kid and then we
started playing like Pokemon cards. But then she kind of
got over that pretty quick. We do have a bunch
of Pokemon cards and it's actually a really fun game.
It's kind of like Magic to Gathering, but like simpler
and more you know, kid friendly, But um, it's cool.
I love you know, I think we all love anime stuff.
(29:38):
And the design and the whole idea of having to
catch them all is interesting because it's sort of a
trap because you can never catch them all because they're
always making new ones. Well, you can try to catch
from all I'm trying to do here in my Pokemon
Gold what you're supposed to be You're so supposed to
be producing this podcast. I can I can multitask. Okay,
(29:59):
Well you remember Pokemon Go though that was an epidemic
on itself. Oh yeah, because we talked about that on
stuff that I want you to know. The company, I
think they're called Nantick were originally some sort of governments
Intel offshoot that then split off and started creating consumer products.
I remember hanging out with hanging out with work buddies
(30:23):
and say no, don't put your phone, don't put your
phone towards me. It was one of those I had
a brief stint of Pokemon Going, and you would say
stuff like, oh no, Ben, you don't understand. It's on
your shoulder, Dude, I got I gotta get it. I'm like, no,
I'm running away. I don't want to be part of this,
no part in this. This isn't specifically referring to Pokemon Go.
This is much earlier than that, Like in the original days,
(30:47):
right when Pokemon, the cartoon and the you know, there
were a lot of video games too, There were a
lot of like, actually, this might even have been earlier
than that. This is in the late nineties, so I'm
having a hard time thinking of the trajector of all
those games like Nintendo DS and all of that stuff
that probably was more in the two thousands. So this
is really ground zero Pokemon days. Yeah, it really took
(31:10):
the country by storm in terms of the cartoon and
the card games. I think was probably the biggest thing.
Oh man. Yeah, and this is for everyone playing along
at home. This is one year after the Olympics come
to Atlanta, Georgian nineteen ninety seven. And a lot of
this is coming to us from an excellent article on
(31:31):
Motherboard via vice. Did Pokemon actually give kids seizures in
the nineties? Shout out to author there, Kaylee Rogers. Kids
are always going to be into flashy, fascinating stuff, and
parents are always going to be concerned about some of
the things that their kids see, even before YouTube became
(31:55):
so ubiquitous, even before social media came into its heyday.
But in nineteen ninety seven, people started to ask, what
if a cartoon can actually hurt my child. And it
was December of that year that an episode of Pokemon
aired in Japan, and apparently tens of thousands of children
(32:18):
watching this experienced seizures, and soon enough people were calling
this the Pokemon Shock. Yeah, so okay, I was sort
of off the mark. The nineteen ninety seven is when
the Pokemon cartoon originated in Japan. The US didn't see, Yeah,
the US didn't see it's Pokemon craze until several years later,
(32:43):
if I'm not mistaken. The franchise was created by Satoshi
Tajiri in nineteen ninety six, and then the cartoon debuted
in nineteen ninety seven and is ongoing with various iterations
and you know, tie ins and video games and all
kinds of different stuff, movies, it's set. But this was
specifically the original Japanese Pokemon craze that we're talking about here.
(33:06):
A yeah, and it's almost you know, it almost didn't
make it to the States because people were worried about
this Pokemon Shock. The idea that children are getting seizures
caused a widespread panic in Japan, where Pokemon is still
very very popular now, and the show went on hiatus
for four months. It almost got canceled, but a guy
(33:28):
named Benjamin Radford, who co authored a study on this,
noted that the story may have become more dangerous than
the actual events, like the folklore of it, the tale
of it may have become scarier than what actually transpired.
And Radford and a co author said this was fascinating.
(33:51):
They thought they could bring something to the table here.
Sir Radford in particular reopens the case out of quote,
just my own curiosity, so I could try to figure
out what happened, and he traces down the exact episode.
It's the thirty eighth episode of season one. Can you
imagine that every British television producer just had a heart attack. Unbelievable. Yeah,
(34:17):
in terms of the length of the season, right right,
you know, a British six episodes made right? What was it?
Sherlock Holmes was three episodes, but they were all like
an hour and a half. Those are like many mini
series and things like that. A lot of times they're
self contained and there won't be very many at all
in a season. But this is much more of an
American you know, phenomenon, but even more so with these cartoons.
(34:41):
Thirty eight the thirty eighth episode of an eighty two
episode long season, and this for something about this episode,
right is what triggered this event um. It aired as
as usual on the evening of December sixteenth, nineteen ninety seven.
The plot is that Ash, who's the young Pokemon trainer
(35:01):
and and his you know, ragtag band of Pokemon uh
get transported into a like I guess it's sort of
like a kind of like a teleportation machine you might
see in like Star trek um and they call it
a Pokemon Transmitter, and they get sent to an alternate
(35:22):
universe that's kind of digitized versions of reality, and then
they have to battle a specific Pokemon, a digital pokemon
um named Porrigon that is being deployed by the villains
of the show, who are the most low key, least malevolent,
bungling villains of any kind of show. You know, they're
(35:43):
always going to lose because they're kind of it's like
Doctor claw in in Inspector Gadget. The stakes are quite low.
Team rockets Um, and they're always trying to get Pikachu.
They want Pikachu so bad. Yeah, there's only Yeah, for
whatever reason, that's the one they're always after. Them. They've
got like a cat that they hang out with talking Pokemon.
They have a pokemon it's a meal that actually talks,
(36:06):
the only one that's such a cool Pokemon they have,
and they're always like, no, we need these other Pokemon
or just like every covetous is what they are. They're
just covetoists, power hungry psychopaths, sociopaths, and they're always pulling
these heist right, and Egon's part of this heist. Yeah.
It's sort of like Pinky in the Brain, where in
every single episode their goal is to take over the world.
(36:26):
The Team Rocket has a singular goal just like that.
So after Ash and Company defeat the Porrigon, that's when
the team I wonder, I wish I could pull up
some images from this episode. I'm imagining it would be
stylized to some degree, this whole digital aspect of it,
So I'm wondering if they used any kind of blocky
pixelae kind of stuff to represent this world, like sort
(36:49):
of bad nineties representations of what the Internet looks like.
Because they are then attacked by an anti virus program,
but Pikachu of course saves the day with his famous
thunderbolt to get it. Electricity, digital world, nice drap Pikachu
very good. He's very very smart, even despite the fact
that he can only say so. Nodder very unclear. For
(37:13):
a lot of these features, I would say I think
they're all pretty gender. Generation two they introduced gender. They do. Okay,
all right, you know Max, I thought Max wasn't paying attention.
I thought he was lost in the Pokemon sauce. But
you're you're, you're here, all right, Yeah, I'm paying attention
to answer the Pokemon question. That has not distinguished whether
or not I've lost in the Pokemon sauce or not.
(37:35):
You have fair point, my friend, fair points. So okay,
here's where the poke rubber hits the poke road. The
animators want to style on this a little bit. It's
your point all about it being a digital world, and
so they use a technique that they call paca PoCA
and this is a this is a process wherein true
(37:55):
colors flash rapidly on the screen. They're red and blue.
Flash is right, We're all thinking epilepsy at this point,
are Yeah, twelve flashes per second for about six seconds,
and you know we epilepsies absolutely something that can be
triggered by flashing lights. Well, nowadays, there's warnings, there's trigger
(38:18):
warnings for anything, like I just recently saw the new
movie from Brandon Cronenberg, Infinity Pool, and it uses all
in camera and practical effects entirely, and there is a
scene that there's like a transformation of one of the
characters that is incredibly strobe. And the same with I
think the most recent Incredibles movie, there was a sign
(38:40):
before you even bought tickets, letting you know, and I
have to imagine that that is largely we have this
event to thank for that kind of thoughtfulness, you know,
in terms of like making sure that everyone has a
good time. There's some people I know that have that
are triggered by these types of flashes, that just can't
go to concerts for fear that there might be some
(39:00):
sequence of lights that might bring on an attack, right,
and it might be something that a venue doesn't think
is extreme enough to warrant heads up, but it can
still affect people with photosensitive epilepsy. And this is what
parents are worried about. This is what a lot of
people in the Japanese public are concerned with because they think,
(39:22):
you know, at the very end of a show their
kid loves, their kid might get a seizure due to
this visual effect. But if you look at the reports
and you see some discrepancies. The reports suggested or implied
that up to twelve thousand kids experienced dizziness, blurred vision,
and convulsions after watching this episode of the show. But
(39:47):
about one and one hundred people have epilepsy, and only
three percent of those one and one hundred people have
photosensitive epilepsy specifically. That's right, So it's not you know,
one size fits all type situation. Um, that rate is
a little bit higher in uh, in young children. But uh,
(40:09):
these reports that were talking about suggested that ten times
as many people had uh photosensitive epilepsy as might have
been expected. Um, so perhaps this is a regional thing.
It's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's it's a little bit unclear,
right then, I mean the question then becomes, our Japanese
(40:29):
kids more susceptible to photosensitive epilepsy? Is there a higher
number that that sort of you know, uh kind of
bucks the trend. I guess, right, that's the greater trend
of of just human beings. Or is there something else
at play here? Right? Right? Max You've got a great
note about the numbers here where where you you said, look,
(40:54):
using these percentages as as we understand them, now, forty
million children would have to watch this show, and they
would only be watching it in Japan, right or primarily
watching it in Japan. And for another new here, in
nineteen ninety seven, the population of Japan was just a
little over one hundred and twenty six million, So this
(41:15):
would be an incredible, a preposterous number of children, right right,
Like you know, if we if we want to try
to like eliminate variables or possible things, we can kind
of eliminate like, was it just a ridiculous number of
people watched this episode? But it's like no, it's like
the amount of people who would have to watch this
episode for this normal percentages to make sense for the
(41:38):
amount of people who got sick just don't line up. Yeah,
but the damage has been done. People were worried, you know,
and they're your kids, you don't want they're someone's kids.
In general, people don't like bad stuff to happen to
children because in general people are decent. At least call
me an optimist, but that's what I would learn opt
(41:59):
to believe thank you, thank you. It's it's a struggle.
I'm a nihilistic optimist. You're an optimist, thank you, Max
an optimist Prime. Oh chucks, you guys, you guys, I
didn't even get you anything today. But call me you're
a megatron exactly, I'll be your huckleberry. But hey, the question, so,
(42:19):
what is the issue here? How could this be something
similar to the kind of copycat mentality that we've been describing,
you know that would require people physically seeing others exhibiting
these symptoms. If if these kids are watching this show
in their own private homes, they wouldn't know what was
(42:40):
happening with the other kids watching the show in their
own private homes. Right, Yeah, And this is where Radford
goes into the psychogenic aspect, just like the laughing epidemic,
and he's saying, look, it's possibly a self produced physical reaction.
People have been convinced by these external influences. You know.
(43:04):
Another thing that makes at least in my experience, another
thing that kids really love is getting access to stuff
they're not supposed to get access to. Right, So, how
much cooler did that episode of Pokemon become when someone said, hey,
you can't watch this show anymore. And so now you're
(43:24):
a kid, You've heard the stories, right, and you sneak,
you somehow sneak inter viewing, and you are so certain
that something will happen to you, that the reaction occurs
or some kind of some kind of reaction and curse.
And again, like any psychogenetic phenomenon, this does not mean
(43:45):
people are faking it. They're not making it up. By
and large, the symptoms are real. It's just they may
be happening due to some other cause. And with this,
we realize that we started digging in these into these stories,
and we discovered this larger phenomenon, and we still have
(44:07):
more that we want to explore. So this is going
to be we talked to area, this is going to
be a recurring thing for us. There's so many strange
historical tales of epidemics from human civilization that have a
lot of these commonalities. For now, nol Max, it sounds
like we're gonna we're gonna call this a day. And
(44:29):
I hope that this episode does not itself become the
cause of an epidemic, or maybe if it's a good epidemic.
Epidemics are never good, right, No, they are not. I
do kind of want to just toss the stand here
at the end, because I was thinking about this when
we're going through Pokemon's shock. But it's like, I haven't
having problems with my skin like allergic reactions. And so
(44:50):
one of these things my doctor has me doing now
is reintroducing things that like like basically try to eliminate
them as being a potential allergen. And so this weekend
I treat us for the first time in a long time,
and I'll tell you right afterwards, for about the next hour,
I thought I was having an allergic breakout, and then
I went and did something and I was fine. And
(45:10):
so it shows what like, you know, are what we
can be like with situations like this, the power of suggestion, right,
because the mind is an amazing and often misunderstood phenomenon itself.
So we hope you enjoyed this exploration of epidemics. We
(45:31):
are going to be back with some more, including things
like well, without spoiling it too much, we're gonna get
to Koro at some point, and we can't wait for
you to join us on that journey. In the meantime,
Noll you think we got a Disney related episode in
the future. Maybe, Oh my god, Yeah, that's a really
good point because when we were talking to our buddies
(45:52):
over at my Mama told you for a segment that
should be coming out before long with the stuff that
I want you to know, Crew, Matt, myself and you've been.
They were asking all these questions about Disney where I
just returned from. One of them being is it true
that at Disney no one can actually ever die there
because if you die there, they remove your corpse and
(46:12):
basically just trundle you out in the front door through
a series of secret tunnels. So while this might be
a bit of maybe this is a crossover episode where
we have Matt on and talk about some Disney history
kind of conspiracies that are a little more lighthearted, maybe
something more in the ridiculous history vein because those parks
at this point, I mean, Disney parks are fifty years
(46:36):
old at this point, this is the fiftieth anniversary, and
they've repurposed so many things. They've rebuilt things, they've replicated things.
I mean, there really is some interesting history to the
Disney theme parks and of themselves outside of just the
larger company, not to mention. I don't know if you
guys know this, you probably do. But finally, Mickey Mouse
(46:58):
is about to officially be in the public domain because Disney. Yeah,
it's happening. Disney is if anyone has followed this for
a long time, the Disney, the Walt Disney Company, has
single handedly been responsible for significant changes in laws surrounding
intellectual property and trademark. And they, you know, we're able
(47:19):
to continuously extend the Mickey Mouse character, you know, extend
that copywriter trade. I'm maybe confusing the two, but the
point is things are supposed to enter the public domain
after one hundred years or so. For example, Winnie the
Pooh just did. And you'll notice there is a slasher
movie called Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey that is
(47:41):
a direct result of that character entering the public domain.
And that could soon happen with the Mouse himself in
twenty twenty four, depending on what Disney, what the Mouse's
lawyers do, Mickey what a journey. Mickey's also you know,
well established in pan h So we'll see how this
(48:03):
affects We'll see how this affects America's favorite mouse. They're
potentially saying that the that the um did that Mickey
will be replaced by the Purple Dragon figment, as as
the mascot of the Disney parks. At the very least,
Disney's characters a lot of changes that didn't age well,
(48:24):
you know, Song of the South, etc. So we have
definitely got an episode or more on Disney that's going
to be coming your way. Folks. We can't wait for
you to join us and stay tuned for some of
our future episodes. We have some guests coming on. We
don't want to spoil too much, but you're in for
(48:44):
some wild rides in the meantime. Speaking of wild rides,
thanks to our pal Alex Williams for this amazing soundtrack.
Thanks to our research associate and superproducer Max Williams. Thanks
to Disney, Thanks to Japan Noel, Thanks to you. I
really now I'm in my head about it. I really
hope that we are never responsible for an epidemic. Oh yeah, me,
(49:06):
I don't want to be patient zero or one, you
know two? Uh yeah, No, it's it's it's a very
it's a it's a heavy burden to carry. It's heavy,
heavy waste the crown. Oh man, what a day we'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from my
(49:32):
Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.