December 6, 2012 • 37 mins
Modern minds likely turn to Monty Python when the notion of lethal comedy arises, but accounts of death by laughter date back to ancient times. Can a joke really kill a person? In this episode, Robert and Julie explore the dark side of laughter.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
From how Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, you welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, did you ever watch Monty
(00:22):
Python Growing Up? Money Python's Flying Surfaced? Yes? How much?
How much? Like in what quantities? Um? Well, you know,
I would say here and there. It probably wasn't until
I was more of a teenager that I really sort
of dabbled in it yourself strict diet I'm imagining for
a short period of time, definitely like junior High. There
was a period in there where they were showing it
(00:43):
regularly on on the Comedy Network whatever it was called
at the time, and and I was this totally new
thing to me, so I just ate it up. And
then then of course me and my friends got into
Money Python, the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, all that,
and just it consumed us for a while and and
definitely had a big impact on my sense of human
(01:04):
I think most people of my age and the earlier
generation as well. But but there's something about being it
just the right age, just at the right time when
all of it was on TV, and you just you
couldn't help it absorb it. Now, did you ever go
lowbrow and put a little Benny Hill in there? Um,
you know, if Benny Hill was on and you're at
that age where aspects of Benny Hill's show definitely appeal
(01:25):
to young male minds. But and it's ultimately I mean,
it was a little body but it was so silly,
like all those chase scenes they do kind of suck
you in a bit. But I don't I don't even
I guess they were showing that on Comedy Central as well.
But today we are talking particularly about one sketch, and
we're gonna roll out the science from this one sketch
(01:47):
and uh, you can probably guess what it's gonna be.
We're gonna play a quick clip from it here, and
then we'll talk about it. This man is Ernest Scribbler,
writer of jokes. In a few moments he will have
written the funniest joe in the world, and as a consequence,
he will die laughing. Kay, all right, we're talking, of course,
(02:29):
about the joke that kills people, the killer joke, the
joke that in this sketch is ultimately weaponized. Um they
end up having it. Anyone who hears it laughs himself
to death, and so they have to get people to
translate it into German. This is during World War two.
Get separate people to translate segments of the joke because
(02:51):
no one can read the whole thing at once or
they'll die. But there too, there wasn't one instance in
this story that they had two words that were translated. Yes,
they were hospital as yes. So you have to be
careful because because the joke and its entirety will kill you.
It's so funny, and even just a little segment, like
maybe just the punch line is enough to do unit.
So they had to send in. They had to break
(03:12):
it up into different words, have translators translate each word,
and then reassemble it in German. And it was in
utilized on the front lines in World War two. They
would have somebody who did not understand German read the
joke aloud, and then any German imagtryment that happened to
hear it would just die laughing right there. So go
ahead and go ahead and read it for us. And
just a quick warning if you speak German watch out,
(03:36):
this might have harmful effects. Yeah, just I mean, maybe
even just turn it off for a moment. All right,
that's a joke. Joke. Warfare, Vinish does, Nontrika Baron does,
all the deflippers bolt. See. Now I couldn't understand it,
or I would have I would have died. Now. I
(03:58):
laughed at that just because I enjoyed the German nous
of it, and your and your accent was was was excellent. Yeah,
But of course anyone who actually speaks German they recognize
that those are not all real German words. This is
ultimately nonsense and gibberish. Because they couldn't. They didn't actually
have a joke at the center of this. The content
of the joke is a mcguffin. There's a lot of
(04:19):
fiction that they create around it, just saying that if
you hear this joke, if you understand it, it kills
you dead. But one can't help. But wonder, is it
possible to have a joke that's so funny that it
kills people? Right, It's possible. It's possible. But of course
that would be uh sort of sort of complicated underlying
conditions here right now, First of all, you would have
(04:42):
to have an exceedingly funny joke, like the funniest joke possible,
and how would we possibly find that. Well, in two
thousand two, some researchers actually looked into this and uh.
It took place at the University of Herefordshire, psychology professor
Richard Wiseman started a program called laugh app. The objective
find the funniest joke across all cultures, regions, demographics, countries,
(05:05):
the funniest joke that then can be unleashed, I guess
on on the world for global domination. Well maybe not
the global domination part, but he was interested in what
makes people tick and certainly what how senses of humor
vary among different groups as well. So they set up
a website and they spent a year collecting jokes. People
would share their favorite jokes, they're the funniest joke they
(05:26):
knew on this website. Other people would come in and
rate the jokes and uh and so over time the
website received forty thousand jokes and one point five million
ratings from all over. They got some international press exposures,
so lots of people were chiming in. So of the
forty thousand jokes submitted. The winner was won by a
guy mean the name of Girpele Gosseil, which which right there,
(05:51):
a thirty one year old psychiatrist from Manchester, England, and
the joke went something like this. Two hunters are out
in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't
seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The
other guy whip side his phone and calls the emergency services.
He guess, my friend is dead. What can I do?
The operator says, calm down, I can help. First, let's
make sure he's dead. There's a silence, then a gunshot
(06:14):
is heard back on the phone. The guy says, okay,
now what now you see I don't know. That wasn't
I That wasn't my favorite. I have to say, yeah,
he doesn't. And I think that's maybe something worth noting
here is that you have such varied senses of humor
that if you find something that everyone agrees on, or
the vast majority of people agree on, it's not gonna
be good. It's like it's like hotel food. The hotel
(06:37):
food or food that's catered at a hotel event, it
has to be palpable by various um senses of taste,
various aversions to spices. It has to meet all these
different dietary requirements. So when you check everything off the list,
you can end up with some pretty bland fair right. Yeah,
and you're right, this is across all cultures. This was
the winning choke. But I did think it was interesting
(06:59):
that there are a different cultural tasting in humor. And
according to the study, people from the Republic of Ireland,
the UK, Australia and New Zealand I'll express a strong
preference for jokes involving word play, which sort of makes sense.
I mean, if you if you think, especially when I
think about Irish humor. Um, so here you want to
read that one, I'm gonna say, here's an example from
(07:20):
that study. Uh that that placed this doctor. I've got
a strawberry stuck up my bum. Doctor says I've got
some cream for that. Now, that one when I when
I read it and heard it again, that one made
me laugh a little more. I have to say, well
and stuck up my bomb. Right, There's just it's funny stuff.
(07:41):
It's a good material. Yeah. So the study figuring out
some interesting things about jokes in general, Like they found
that the perfect length of the joke is around a
hundred words. That the best animal to place uh in
a in a person's role, The best anthroomorphized animal to
feature in a joke is the duck, which which I
think is perfect. There's always the joke you can make
(08:02):
lots of There's lots of word play to be made
with the ducks bill, you know, putting it on the
ducks bill, and and ducks are always walking into bars,
you know how. Um, And they found that this was
interesting to that Germans appreciate a wide variety of humor. Yes,
and immediately thought, oh, well, I remember when Seinfeld played
(08:23):
in Germany and there was all of this kerfuffle because um,
it was poled. It just didn't do that well that
the TV series Seinfeld in Germany. But so I immediately thought, oh, well,
you know, you know, let me do just a sweeping generalization.
Perhaps they don't have the sense of humor that other
people do. But it turns out that they actually have
a more nuanced and complex sense of humor. Well that's
(08:45):
what they say. And Okay. On one hand, there's like
the stereotypical German that we all sort of get decided
a German is a very serious, regimented person, and maybe
they're not that inclined to humor, despite the fact that
they do have all puppet hip hop acts in Berlin.
But when I was there briefly on like a school
trip back in high school, I I distinctly remember turning
(09:08):
on the German TV and even then I was I
was expecting some you know, sort of Sprockets esque kraft Work,
e German nous, And there was a comedy on, for sure.
It was on in the lobby of this this hotel,
and it was some. It was really Binny Hill esque
and reminiscent of the the really outlandish humor that you'll
see on various Spanish television um sides. So so that
(09:32):
alone let me know that, yes there's some they're not
all German humors necessarily going to be that complex, uh,
And I would like to study that out. They like
a wide variety of things, so stereotypes are a little elusive,
I guess in figuring all of that out. Although to
continue to talk about stereotypes, I should mention that in
terms of cultural taste, Americans and Canadians tend to prefer
(09:54):
jokes that are trade on the theme of superiority, either
you know, sort of making fun of it or elevating it. Um.
Here's an example. A Texans says where are you from?
And Harvard grad says, I come from a place where
we do not end our sentences with prepositions. And then
the Texans says, okay, where are you from? Jackass? And actually,
(10:17):
my I've heard my father in law tell this before
some sort of version of it, so I thought that
was interesting. And then there's a computer generated joke that
actually made the cut here because the researchers wanted to
insert some computer generated jokes to see how they would do,
and they put five of the jokes in there. Four
of them fell flat, but one of them was successful.
(10:39):
Do you know that one? Oh? Yes, yes, we have
it right here. What kind of murderer has moral fiber?
A serial killer? I love it. I gotta tell you,
I don't know what that says about my sense of humor,
but that's funny. Well, that gag scored higher than one
third of all human jokes, so I guess it's you know,
the Peter world that robots are the kind of stand
(11:02):
up comedians. They get up there, they're gonna they're gonna
throw stuff out there. There's just gonna fail, but when
they hit it, you know it's going to be well.
That kind of also harkens back to our episode on
computers and creativity and their ability to actually make something
that is novel. But anyway, there you go, here's the
research about the funniest joke in the world. You know,
(11:23):
obviously no one was going to die from laughing, but this,
this term we even have dying of laughter is something
that has been with us for centuries, and you can
actually place it back in um in Taming of the
Shrew around six when Shakespeare wrote went they not quickly,
I should die with laughing, which really sort of means
(11:45):
if they hadn't left soon, I would have died laughing.
So it's been around for a while, this idea that
we could laugh so hard that we could expire from it.
And I'm going to run through a few more examples
of of supposed in some cases, in some more verified
cases of people who've actually died quote unquote of laughter.
But real quick, we should we should touch base on
(12:07):
just just a reminder about laughter and physiology. We recently
did an episode titled what did we call? That episode?
The healing power of laughter. That's what it was. Yes,
So we we talked about how a good hearty laugh
can help you out. It can heal you, it can
it gets your your heart beating. It's a full body experience.
(12:27):
I mean basically when we laugh, we have changes occurring
and all different parts of the body, even the arms,
the legs, obviously, the trunk, muscles. I mean we have
to term bell you laugh for a reason because you're
laughing so hard. You're just you're shaking like a bowl
full of jelly. Right. Respiratory system is up is upset um.
In some cases you're actually crying um. You're you may
(12:48):
be struggling for breath. Your face becomes moist and red.
I mean you you you're having a full body episode.
And if you did not know what laughter is, if
you've grown up in a mystical land where there was
no humor and you saw all somebody laughing, you might
think it was some sort of a seizure. It's true.
And actually the speaking of seizure, I mean just kind
of go over how it's working in your brain. Your
(13:10):
brain's pre mort or cortical region is activated. And this
is important because this is the part of the brain
that stands up ready to react to sound. Then the
left side of your cerebral cortex interprets the content and
the structure of the piece of humor, and then the
right side of the cortex performs the analysis, enabling you
to get the joke. And then an electrical wave pulses
through your cerebral cortex about four tenths of a second later,
(13:33):
and you laugh if the wave takes a negative charge.
So already right there, you can see that there's a
very complex set of motions going on in your brain
and your body. And if you were to tell me, hey,
the government's working on a weapon that does just this
list of things to the human body, I'd be like, WHOA,
I'm not even sure if that's a non lethal weapon
that sounds potentially dangerous and a little that might be
(13:55):
outlawed by some sort of international convention, but it can
conceivably just be a real well told joke. And it's
true because we know that laughing sometimes will lead to
blacking out, and this is usually related to overbreathing, and
it's usually not too dangerous, but there are times when
you've got underlying conditions where it could actually become quite dangerous. Yes,
(14:17):
and we'll we'll get into that in a minute. But first,
people who have died or are said to have died
by laughter. I'm not going to run through all of them.
You can easily find a list of these accounts online,
but I'm gonna touch on a few of them here.
One important one, at least in the lore of dying
by laughter is Chrysippus. Chrystippus was amongst the most influential
(14:37):
philosophers of the Hellenistic period, and it had a huge
role on the development of stoicism, which is excellent because
you used tend to think of a stoic individual is
not necessarily being a person who's gonna engage in a
lot of laughter, much less a lethal dosage of laughter,
right is. It turns out there are two different stories
about it. How he died, and he died at the
age of seventy three, and and that was in two
(15:00):
two and six BC. Okay, that's a pretty advanced age
at that time. Yeah, of course, you know he's living.
He's like a philosopher. To be a specialized philosopher in
any age, it kind of implies that maybe you have
you know, not not to not philosophers, but you're not
gonna get crushed by a falling rock. Generally, you're not
gonna be doing a lot of hard labors where you're Yeah.
(15:20):
So anyway, one story is that Christmas just drank a
lot of wine at a feast, grew dizzy and died. Okay,
that's possible. But then there's another story that after an ass,
you know, a donkey, had eaten up his figs, he
cried out to an old woman, Now give the ass
a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs,
and then he laughed so heartily that he died. So um,
(15:45):
I just love that. From this period, it seems like
people are getting their pets in the farm animals drunk
a lot. Yes, you're thinking, of course of our friend,
uh Tico, Yeah, well actually who was later on? It's
still I kind of think that this is an absence
of any parlor games. You go ahead and get the
animal off the farm and start having it chugged something. Well,
(16:08):
it comes back to the duck, right. The whole reason
they asked the question, what's the most hilarious animal to
have doing human things and engaging in a human joke.
The duck is certainly the funniest, but there are other
funny creatures to how to do human things, and one
of them is the donkey. A donkey doing anything non
donkey is pretty hilarious. Likewise, the monkey, uh Like, it's
interesting if you look, go to a museum. Go to
(16:30):
a big museum next time, be on the lookout for
this particular motif, a monkey riding a horse. It's it's
generated laughter since time out of mind, since we've actually
ridden horses. Like, the idea that a monkey could do
it is just somehow instantly hilarious. You can read into
that way you will. Perhaps it's the the idea that
a monkey riding a horses is threatening. What if they
(16:51):
ride they'll be like Planet of the Apes, right, Or
maybe it's just the fact that we look down on
the monkey as something less than us, and the idea
that the monkey could do what we do is that
laughter zone for us. Well, it's like whenever I want
to make my daughter laugh, I'll just say like, hey,
do you think that car ahead of us? Do you
think that a cat's driving it? And then she'll start
laughing outside But it's wearing a bow tie, and it's
just because of up to Annie even more. Yeah, yeah,
(17:13):
the layers of ridiculousness, goats, cats, poppy, I mean, all
fair game for for laughter by by far anyway. So Chrysippus,
who knows there are two stories there. Certainly if he
was seventy three, I could imagine it's possible that he
died by laughter. It's you might have had, you know, again,
an underlying heart condition. There another guy of note from
(17:34):
the old world, well not as old world. We have
a man by the name of Martin of Aragon. Martin
was the King of Aragon, Valencia, Sardinia, Corsica and Count
of Barcelona from and king of Sicily from fourteen o nine,
and he died in fourteen ten. Okay, so what happened here?
(17:54):
The accounts say that he died due to a kind
of a mixture of serious indigestion and laughter. Now he
was only fifty six. And I think one possibility here
is that I was reading a little bit about heart attacks.
And you do have this situation where someone someone has only, say,
seen a heart attack on television. What do they think
(18:15):
of They think of Fred Sandford having the big one,
these Hollywood heart attacks. But in reality you can sometimes
have a heart attack, experience a heart attack, and you
might conceivably pass it off as innigestion because it's not
this Hollywood Fred Sanford stumbling around the room kind of situation.
So it seems to me, and I'm no, you know,
I'm not weighing in as an expert here, but it
(18:35):
seems to me it's it's likely that he may have
had a heart attack while laughing, and that's what killed.
Are you wearing that lab coat and saying that at
the same time, I totally believe you. That's why you
need to look expert. Yeah, um, yeah, it's very very possible.
And again this this is a sort of theme we
see when we look at more modern cases of and
(18:56):
who know. Again, anytime you're looking at a two possible
ways of person died, like ultimately, like, no one wants
to die laughing, but you gotta admit it sounds like
a good way to go. Like, if you got to
go out some way in it's little stressful, it might
as well be dying laughing. Yeah, there are many many
other ways that I wouldn't want to go out. So
you could see that where certainly centuries or millennia after
(19:17):
someone has died, the story might get shifted into a
happy year. Oh he was a stoic, but he died laughing.
It's just a great story, you know, which brings us
to more modern times. There have been a few instances,
but the most interesting one, the one that has been
more closely studied certainly has become part of comedy lore,
has to do with the older show called The Goodies,
which I was not familiar with this. Were you familiar
(19:39):
with the Goodies? No? But just the entire situation and
what this person was laughing at I couldn't help yeah,
but be tickled by. I mean, it's unfortunate for the
person who passed away from laughter at this. But we're
talking about this good the Goodies, which is a TV show,
and uh, we're talking about nineteen right, fifty year old
brick player Alex Mitchell in England. He actually kicked the
(20:04):
bucket while roaring with laughter at one of these shows Goodies.
And do you want to describe this? Oh the sketches,
because okay, so The Goodies is basically three dudes, um
one or more of them went to college with the
guys in Monty Python, so they kind of shared a
similar love of the absurd, and it's certainly absurd to watch. Again.
(20:25):
I've never seen any of this and I don't have
any nostalgia for it. So if you're a big fan
of the goodies out there right in, I'd love to
hear your take on it. But this particular sketch that
arguably killed Alex Mitchell was a kung Fu caper sketch. Uh.
And this is a nineteen seventy five kung fu is
big and everyone's excited about it and doing songs and whatnot.
In this surreal sketch, you have a man from Lancashire
(20:50):
battling via kung fu Scottish bagpipers. There's a man in
black face as an American boxer. There's a mime like
a French mine. There's an Australian with a boomerang. So
it's like a battle like a kung Fu battle of
weird kind of distasteful stereotypes. I mean, well, isn't there
there's putting involved? Right? This is I think the pudding
(21:11):
is what I was like, what what is going on?
The Lancashire mode of martial arts and this is called
ikey thump and it involves palting opponents with black pudding. Okay,
so the white stripes, which I can only assume there's
some sort of correlation here. There's some sort of nutty
(21:32):
white stripes. Okay, So yeah, this guy is watching this. Yeah,
and you know, unfortunately, after twenty five minutes of laughing,
he actually, according to his wife, gave a tremendous belly
laugh and then keeled over. Yes, um, yeah, what a
way to go. And it wasn't just that he was
laughing so very hard that he expired, you know, from
(21:54):
a heart attack. It was actually that he had an
unusual inheritable heart rhythm disorder called long QT syndrome. Yeah
Qt like the gas station, yes, quick trip. And this
actually again keep showing up again and again that there's
some sort of underlying heart condition. And I did want
to mention the Danish audiologist. Have you heard about this guy?
(22:17):
He died laughing in nine while watching a fish called Wanda.
That now that I can I can get because there's
some death and again the python element, I know, see
it is dangerous. Right. When the film was shown in
theaters in Denmark, Ole Benson, the audiologist, laughed himself to
death during this scene where Ken gets chips stuck up
(22:37):
his nose or rather, um, I can't remember the Auto character, Yeah,
Kevin Klein's character. I think it is Auto sticks French
fries also called chips right up his nose. So Benson
is watching this, His heart rate went between two hundred
and fifty five hundred beats per minute, and he eventually
succumbed to cardiac arrest, and his family theorizes that the
(22:57):
scene reminded him of a thing only dinner a few
years earlier, when Old put a piece of cauliflower up
his and everyone uh in his family's noses as a
joke and made a bet with them on who could
eat up their carrots without cauliflower falling out. So they
think that the scene with Ken and the chips really
sort of insited this crazy laughter because he was remembering
(23:21):
his own scene. Yeah, it's very sad, I gotta say,
But Fish Called Wanted is a very very funny movie. Yeah,
but in this case Mitchell QT syndrome. Cardiac arrests triggered
by exertion, adrenaline, or a strong emotional response didn't always
shut down the person entirely. Sometimes the heart resets itself
after five or six beats. But they figured that this
(23:43):
was what was the heart of it when they diagnosed
his daughter with it, and it's an hereditary condition. So
the doctors at that point said, well, this, this is
clearly the leading candidate for how this goody sketch did
him in. And you know, we were talking about it
being a good way to die, as good as any
of them are, and certainly his his wife, his his widow,
(24:03):
she continues to have a rather positive viewing of this,
Like she actually wrote the guys in the Goodies and said, hey, my, my,
my husband. He was always a huge fan and he
died laughing at your show. And you know this is
before we became a very litigious society. I have to
say this nineteen I don't know that if the same
thing would happen today. There's another person too that we
(24:25):
have an example of this is the ice cream truck
driver in Thailand. He actually died in his sleep, laughing,
and his wife said that she tried to wake him up,
but he kept laughing, and then autopsy suggested that he
might have had a heart attack. So not only dying
in your sleep, but you're dying while you're you know,
presumably having a really funny dream. Yes, and then we
(24:48):
also should mention laughter induced asthma. This is not really
a strong candidate for killing anyone. Laughter induced asthma. More
than half of people with asthma report that their symptoms
are brought on by laughter. This according to a two
thousand five from n YU Medical Center in New York.
Asthma that's triggered by laughter usually doesn't seem to cause
serious asthma flare ups compared to other types of asthma.
(25:09):
But the study did suggest that laughter induced asthma maybe
a sign that your asthma isn't as well controlled as
it could be. So it's more of a more of
a warning sign that you you need to adjust your
management of your asthma than anything else. Before we get
into pathological laughter, I want to mention one more thing
that can contribute to not lethal laughter, but certainly an
issue where laughter shuts down the body and interesting ways,
(25:32):
and that is a cataplexy. This involves a sudden loss
of voluntary muscle tone that may be triggered by strong emotions.
That's often a symptom of narcolepsy, which is a chronic
disorder of the central nervous system characterized by the brains
and ability to control your your sleep wake cycles. It
can occur spontaneously, but is often triggered by against sudden
(25:52):
strong emotions such as fear, anger, stress, excitement, or humor.
So laughter is reportedly the most common cause of this.
And if this is ring any bells for anyone out there,
there was an episode of This American Life a few
years back about a neuroscientist by the name of Matt
Frecking who suffers from cataplexy attacks when he's happy. So
it was a real one of these really down er,
(26:14):
somber episodes of This American Life because he's a happily
married man but he has to limit his joy because
his body shuts down when he experiences too much happiness
in his life. That's just awful, it is. It's a
great episode. So look that one up. Just look up
Matt threking F R E K I N G and
(26:34):
This American Life and you'll find that episode. Well, I mean,
you know, because we're all seeking joy and happiness all
the time, right to think that you'd have to actually
tamp that down. Yeah, it's like he's uh, you know,
in a way, it's like enforced Buddhism in a kind
of interested manner, you know about trying to steer yourself
clear of extremes. But yeah, it's that's rough, all right. Um,
(26:55):
you had mentioned pathological laughter. Now, this, according to the
Mayo Clinic, is laughter that can stem from a variety
of neurological disorders, and it can make it extremely difficult,
sometimes impossible for individuals to control their laughter, even if
they see no humor in a situation. And in some cases,
this pathological laughing can switch to pathological crying and the
(27:19):
person cannot do anything about it. And that's that's the
thing about this is again there's the context maybe completely
like you could be in a job interview and begin
this pathological laughing or crying. It seems to occur most
frequently among people with something called amniotrophic lateral sclerosis, and
this is a disease of cerebral and spinal nerve cells.
(27:40):
And then almost half of these patients have these PLC symptoms,
So they're not exactly sure what is the mechanism that
is creating this sort of disorder, but uh, you know,
they're looking more into it. Yeah, PLC pathological laughter and crying,
and that the take come here is that it's a
disturbance of feeling rather than a disturbance of emotions. So
(28:02):
it's not that you know, so if you know anyone
or encounter anyone that has this, it's not that they're
setting there thinking, oh my god, funerals are hilarious. No,
it's this that like they're feeling the authentic emotions, are
feeling what they should feel in the scenario, and what
comes out that's where the disconnect happens. Now, there is
this idea that, um, it could be a serotonin imbalance,
(28:23):
and they think that because researchers have had some positive
results with antidepressants like the selective serotonin re uptake inhibitors.
So again they're still looking into this, but um, they
don't know a whole lot yet. In a lot of
these conditions to it comes down to lesions and tumors
that are disinhibiting laughter and crying centers of the brain.
(28:43):
They're basically altering the neural network necessary for what we
think of is normal responses situations. Yeah, I remember one
article that you had sent me that it was about
a two year old who had a lesion and at
the time the mother didn't know it. She just like
even the two year old was laughing hysterically out of context,
and they finally figured out. Now I believe they operated
(29:04):
and the child was okay. But yeah, I can definitely
disturb what seems to be your personality. Yeah, there's a
really interesting YouTube video that I'll definitely embed on the
blog post accompanying this website. The number of you may
have seen, there's a Dutch interview and on the YouTube
you can you can click a little tab that will
actually bring up subtitles for it, so it's not just
(29:26):
people in another language, you know, doing a thing. But
there was a dutchman by the name of hoog Boss
and the whole thing is an interview with him and
his wife, and the whole time he's laughing hysterically. Um,
and this being the first time you see him, Like
you you know, we've talked about how laughter is contagious,
so you see this man just laughing his head off,
and you're like, this guy's hilarious, he's fun. He's look
(29:48):
at him. He's clutching like an Ernie doll at one point.
But his wife is sitting there the whole time just
is done with She is over it. She has the
most sour look on her face. And you're right at
the beginning, you're like, oh, man, he's he's great, he's warm,
he's funny. Why he's your husband, and he's laughing all
the time, But so what? And then a couple of
minutes into it, you realize how frustrating it must be
(30:09):
for her because he laughs all the time. His response
to everything is laughter, except when he hears the national
anthem and then yeah, when he hears Holland's national national anthem.
But now this is what I don't think they actually
got to the absolute bottom of. But they suspect that
this occurred because he had an operation and they think
that the anesthesia may have altered, you know, neurologically the
(30:34):
way that he his laughter response is coming in and
because you know, his wife says, this didn't happen before
the operation, and again it is it is hilarious to watch,
but it's also kind of sad too, because he doesn't
really give a straight answer. You know, he talks, but
you can't really tell if he's just trying to tamp
down his own laughter or perhaps there's something else going
(30:56):
on there right now. And again, this is a situation
or someone who's laughing at at everything except in the
national anthem. But there is an interesting study you came across,
the Seinfeld study. An individual that is reacting with hysterical
pathological laughter but only to a particular thing or a
particular a very narrow segment of comedy. Yeah, it's called
(31:20):
the Seinfeld syncope. And it's basically a fainting episode through laughter.
And it was called the Seinfeld sincope because there have
been a couple of instances where people were watching Seinfeld
and know only Seinfeld and laughing to such a degree
that they began to faint. But what is going on
here is that the show is actually revealing that there's
(31:41):
a potentially serious problem in the person. The one guy
who was sixty two years old, he had a history
of hypertension, hyper cholesterol, lemmia, he had a coronary bypass,
and he was a smoker, and although he received enough
blood to the brain when he was calm, when he
laughed hysterically, he experienced a normal physiological phenomenon called the
(32:01):
Valsalva maneuver. Now, when this happens, you get forced expiration
against a closed airway, resulting in increased pressure in the
chest that affects the heart output inside, like the yoga
breath where you like, uh, school breath. Is that we're
talking about um breath of fire? Yeah, maybe in a
way that I don't know if it's the exact same thing.
(32:23):
But in the other yes, is the kin to it
and that is causing this pressure. And because he had
blocked arteries coming off of the Aorita, this Valsavia maneuver
reduced the blifflow to his brain in and caused him
to faint. Now what he was watching specifically was the
character of George Costanza, by the way, Yeah, I found
that that. I mean, that was what was so interesting
(32:45):
that it was. It was not just only Seinfeldt, but
it was like one character on Seinfeldt that was really
causing this for him. And I could see if it
was the Marine Biologist episode, because I really like that boy.
Well he was pretending to be a marine and then
the whale washed up. You know, always fun to see
George unmasked. But I don't know who knows which one
it was. But again, not so much that Seinfeld un
(33:06):
Seinfeld was funny, but but not so much that there
was something about seinfeld that was that was impacting people's health,
but the individuals had something askew in their own physiology
that made them susceptible to this attack. And just real quick,
it's worth noting that you also see things like Angelman
syndrome Tourette syndrome. Both of these carried laughters of symptom.
You often see patholytical laughter occurring as a symptom. So
(33:28):
it's not, oh, well, that person's laughs all the time.
It's no, that person laughs all the time. Let's get
to the bottom of it. So Tourette syndrome is a
neurobiological disorder that causes the combination of ticks and involuntary
vocal outbursts. This is we could do a whole podcast
on Tourette's. But this is one that is often misrepresented
to a large extent, and this is certainly in comedy.
(33:49):
It's people come back to and use it as a
as part of a comedy act, which is someone shouting obscenities.
But that's a rather simplistic look at what that condition
actually is. And then Angelman syndrome is a rare chromosome,
a disorder that affects the nervous system. So people with
this condition usually can't speak and display a quote happy,
excitable demeanor with frequent smiling and laughter. M okay, So
(34:12):
there you have it, death by laughter, the possibility of
death by laughter. I guess the will take home here
is that you probably could not craft a joke so
funny that it would You would have difficulty even crafting
a joke to target a particular individual, like an assassin's
bullet of a joke, like if you wanted to take
(34:33):
out us fitting head of state and you put a
lot of research and all right, what do they find funny?
What's there? What's their heart condition? Like? What you know?
How healthy are they? If you put that much work
in it, you could perhaps incapacitate them a little bit, maybe,
but it would be very difficult to actually craft the
killing joke. Yeah, it would be very very hard. Now
do you remember in the Monty Python's get about the
(34:53):
World's myth dangerous joke, the killing joke, what the Germans
tried to craft In response, No, I don't, and they
over the radio there were sweet peanuts fucking down Distrasse
and Vaughan Vos assaulted peanut. It is really funny, it's
a pretty good, like it's funny watching the reaction that
(35:16):
people who are listening to it over the radio because
they're just they're just their faces are blank. And but
it is absurd. Is that sketches. It really does drive
home the how the absurdity like humor is one of
those things that doesn't necessarily cross to other languages all
that well. I often feel like British humor I totally get.
I share the language with it. If I turn on
the Spanish TV network and I happened to catch some
(35:38):
of that. Sometimes I'll see some of the slapstick and
it's making sense. But then I seem to have like
a real disconnect with Japanese humor, Like I love a
lot of media that comes this way from Japan, but
but when I encounter humor it often I often feel like, wow,
this is not speaking to me, Like my I don't
have the right cultural wavelengths set. What about do you
think there's a French humor? Oh yeah, yeah, okay, tell
(36:00):
me tell me about what you think the French humor is. Well,
I mean the stereotype, of course, is the French love
Jerry Lewis. Yeah, but that's an American I mean certainly
have like the roots of of mime and uh, and
you have puppetry is of course big street puppetry. To
see some it's not punching Judy in France, they have
another name. But I have seen some some French puppetry
(36:22):
in that vein and it's it's hilarious. But I don't know.
I think if we look close enough, we'd find that
even French humor is more diverse than we think. You know, oh,
I'm sure, I'm sure. I'm just thinking that's not really
known as as a big export for France, so just
just curious. I tend to think the French this is
just a huge generation. I think they like grotesque looking
men doing ridiculous things, but I think that probably the
(36:44):
same for most cultures. Yeah, all right, Well that's the
episode we'd love to hear from you guys and gals
out there. If you have any personal experience with with
deadly laughter or with any of these conditions that we've
mentioned here, we'd really love to hear some insider insight
on that and what it's like to live with it,
(37:05):
or if you just have thoughts in general about laughter.
Responding to this episode or our previous episode about the
healing power of laughter. We've kind of given you the
the yen and the yang here looking at laughter. Is
this this physiological um mental event that in the right
or wrong situations, can go either way? So reach out
to us. You can find us on Facebook, where we
are Stuff to Blow Your Mind. We're also stuff to
(37:26):
Blow your Mind on Tumblr, and you can follow us
on Twitter under the handle blow the Mind. And you
can also drop us a line at blow the Mind
at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
(37:50):
brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the two thousand twelve Toyota Camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind?
From how Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, you welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb
and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie, did you ever watch Monty
(00:22):
Python Growing Up? Money Python's Flying Surfaced? Yes? How much?
How much? Like in what quantities? Um? Well, you know,
I would say here and there. It probably wasn't until
I was more of a teenager that I really sort
of dabbled in it yourself strict diet I'm imagining for
a short period of time, definitely like junior High. There
was a period in there where they were showing it
(00:43):
regularly on on the Comedy Network whatever it was called
at the time, and and I was this totally new
thing to me, so I just ate it up. And
then then of course me and my friends got into
Money Python, the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, all that,
and just it consumed us for a while and and
definitely had a big impact on my sense of human
(01:04):
I think most people of my age and the earlier
generation as well. But but there's something about being it
just the right age, just at the right time when
all of it was on TV, and you just you
couldn't help it absorb it. Now, did you ever go
lowbrow and put a little Benny Hill in there? Um,
you know, if Benny Hill was on and you're at
that age where aspects of Benny Hill's show definitely appeal
(01:25):
to young male minds. But and it's ultimately I mean,
it was a little body but it was so silly,
like all those chase scenes they do kind of suck
you in a bit. But I don't I don't even
I guess they were showing that on Comedy Central as well.
But today we are talking particularly about one sketch, and
we're gonna roll out the science from this one sketch
(01:47):
and uh, you can probably guess what it's gonna be.
We're gonna play a quick clip from it here, and
then we'll talk about it. This man is Ernest Scribbler,
writer of jokes. In a few moments he will have
written the funniest joe in the world, and as a consequence,
he will die laughing. Kay, all right, we're talking, of course,
(02:29):
about the joke that kills people, the killer joke, the
joke that in this sketch is ultimately weaponized. Um they
end up having it. Anyone who hears it laughs himself
to death, and so they have to get people to
translate it into German. This is during World War two.
Get separate people to translate segments of the joke because
(02:51):
no one can read the whole thing at once or
they'll die. But there too, there wasn't one instance in
this story that they had two words that were translated. Yes,
they were hospital as yes. So you have to be
careful because because the joke and its entirety will kill you.
It's so funny, and even just a little segment, like
maybe just the punch line is enough to do unit.
So they had to send in. They had to break
(03:12):
it up into different words, have translators translate each word,
and then reassemble it in German. And it was in
utilized on the front lines in World War two. They
would have somebody who did not understand German read the
joke aloud, and then any German imagtryment that happened to
hear it would just die laughing right there. So go
ahead and go ahead and read it for us. And
just a quick warning if you speak German watch out,
(03:36):
this might have harmful effects. Yeah, just I mean, maybe
even just turn it off for a moment. All right,
that's a joke. Joke. Warfare, Vinish does, Nontrika Baron does,
all the deflippers bolt. See. Now I couldn't understand it,
or I would have I would have died. Now. I
(03:58):
laughed at that just because I enjoyed the German nous
of it, and your and your accent was was was excellent. Yeah,
But of course anyone who actually speaks German they recognize
that those are not all real German words. This is
ultimately nonsense and gibberish. Because they couldn't. They didn't actually
have a joke at the center of this. The content
of the joke is a mcguffin. There's a lot of
(04:19):
fiction that they create around it, just saying that if
you hear this joke, if you understand it, it kills
you dead. But one can't help. But wonder, is it
possible to have a joke that's so funny that it
kills people? Right, It's possible. It's possible. But of course
that would be uh sort of sort of complicated underlying
conditions here right now, First of all, you would have
(04:42):
to have an exceedingly funny joke, like the funniest joke possible,
and how would we possibly find that. Well, in two
thousand two, some researchers actually looked into this and uh.
It took place at the University of Herefordshire, psychology professor
Richard Wiseman started a program called laugh app. The objective
find the funniest joke across all cultures, regions, demographics, countries,
(05:05):
the funniest joke that then can be unleashed, I guess
on on the world for global domination. Well maybe not
the global domination part, but he was interested in what
makes people tick and certainly what how senses of humor
vary among different groups as well. So they set up
a website and they spent a year collecting jokes. People
would share their favorite jokes, they're the funniest joke they
(05:26):
knew on this website. Other people would come in and
rate the jokes and uh and so over time the
website received forty thousand jokes and one point five million
ratings from all over. They got some international press exposures,
so lots of people were chiming in. So of the
forty thousand jokes submitted. The winner was won by a
guy mean the name of Girpele Gosseil, which which right there,
(05:51):
a thirty one year old psychiatrist from Manchester, England, and
the joke went something like this. Two hunters are out
in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't
seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The
other guy whip side his phone and calls the emergency services.
He guess, my friend is dead. What can I do?
The operator says, calm down, I can help. First, let's
make sure he's dead. There's a silence, then a gunshot
(06:14):
is heard back on the phone. The guy says, okay,
now what now you see I don't know. That wasn't
I That wasn't my favorite. I have to say, yeah,
he doesn't. And I think that's maybe something worth noting
here is that you have such varied senses of humor
that if you find something that everyone agrees on, or
the vast majority of people agree on, it's not gonna
be good. It's like it's like hotel food. The hotel
(06:37):
food or food that's catered at a hotel event, it
has to be palpable by various um senses of taste,
various aversions to spices. It has to meet all these
different dietary requirements. So when you check everything off the list,
you can end up with some pretty bland fair right. Yeah,
and you're right, this is across all cultures. This was
the winning choke. But I did think it was interesting
(06:59):
that there are a different cultural tasting in humor. And
according to the study, people from the Republic of Ireland,
the UK, Australia and New Zealand I'll express a strong
preference for jokes involving word play, which sort of makes sense.
I mean, if you if you think, especially when I
think about Irish humor. Um, so here you want to
read that one, I'm gonna say, here's an example from
(07:20):
that study. Uh that that placed this doctor. I've got
a strawberry stuck up my bum. Doctor says I've got
some cream for that. Now, that one when I when
I read it and heard it again, that one made
me laugh a little more. I have to say, well
and stuck up my bomb. Right, There's just it's funny stuff.
(07:41):
It's a good material. Yeah. So the study figuring out
some interesting things about jokes in general, Like they found
that the perfect length of the joke is around a
hundred words. That the best animal to place uh in
a in a person's role, The best anthroomorphized animal to
feature in a joke is the duck, which which I
think is perfect. There's always the joke you can make
(08:02):
lots of There's lots of word play to be made
with the ducks bill, you know, putting it on the
ducks bill, and and ducks are always walking into bars,
you know how. Um, And they found that this was
interesting to that Germans appreciate a wide variety of humor. Yes,
and immediately thought, oh, well, I remember when Seinfeld played
(08:23):
in Germany and there was all of this kerfuffle because um,
it was poled. It just didn't do that well that
the TV series Seinfeld in Germany. But so I immediately thought, oh, well,
you know, you know, let me do just a sweeping generalization.
Perhaps they don't have the sense of humor that other
people do. But it turns out that they actually have
a more nuanced and complex sense of humor. Well that's
(08:45):
what they say. And Okay. On one hand, there's like
the stereotypical German that we all sort of get decided
a German is a very serious, regimented person, and maybe
they're not that inclined to humor, despite the fact that
they do have all puppet hip hop acts in Berlin.
But when I was there briefly on like a school
trip back in high school, I I distinctly remember turning
(09:08):
on the German TV and even then I was I
was expecting some you know, sort of Sprockets esque kraft Work,
e German nous, And there was a comedy on, for sure.
It was on in the lobby of this this hotel,
and it was some. It was really Binny Hill esque
and reminiscent of the the really outlandish humor that you'll
see on various Spanish television um sides. So so that
(09:32):
alone let me know that, yes there's some they're not
all German humors necessarily going to be that complex, uh,
And I would like to study that out. They like
a wide variety of things, so stereotypes are a little elusive,
I guess in figuring all of that out. Although to
continue to talk about stereotypes, I should mention that in
terms of cultural taste, Americans and Canadians tend to prefer
(09:54):
jokes that are trade on the theme of superiority, either
you know, sort of making fun of it or elevating it. Um.
Here's an example. A Texans says where are you from?
And Harvard grad says, I come from a place where
we do not end our sentences with prepositions. And then
the Texans says, okay, where are you from? Jackass? And actually,
(10:17):
my I've heard my father in law tell this before
some sort of version of it, so I thought that
was interesting. And then there's a computer generated joke that
actually made the cut here because the researchers wanted to
insert some computer generated jokes to see how they would do,
and they put five of the jokes in there. Four
of them fell flat, but one of them was successful.
(10:39):
Do you know that one? Oh? Yes, yes, we have
it right here. What kind of murderer has moral fiber?
A serial killer? I love it. I gotta tell you,
I don't know what that says about my sense of humor,
but that's funny. Well, that gag scored higher than one
third of all human jokes, so I guess it's you know,
the Peter world that robots are the kind of stand
(11:02):
up comedians. They get up there, they're gonna they're gonna
throw stuff out there. There's just gonna fail, but when
they hit it, you know it's going to be well.
That kind of also harkens back to our episode on
computers and creativity and their ability to actually make something
that is novel. But anyway, there you go, here's the
research about the funniest joke in the world. You know,
(11:23):
obviously no one was going to die from laughing, but this,
this term we even have dying of laughter is something
that has been with us for centuries, and you can
actually place it back in um in Taming of the
Shrew around six when Shakespeare wrote went they not quickly,
I should die with laughing, which really sort of means
(11:45):
if they hadn't left soon, I would have died laughing.
So it's been around for a while, this idea that
we could laugh so hard that we could expire from it.
And I'm going to run through a few more examples
of of supposed in some cases, in some more verified
cases of people who've actually died quote unquote of laughter.
But real quick, we should we should touch base on
(12:07):
just just a reminder about laughter and physiology. We recently
did an episode titled what did we call? That episode?
The healing power of laughter. That's what it was. Yes,
So we we talked about how a good hearty laugh
can help you out. It can heal you, it can
it gets your your heart beating. It's a full body experience.
(12:27):
I mean basically when we laugh, we have changes occurring
and all different parts of the body, even the arms,
the legs, obviously, the trunk, muscles. I mean we have
to term bell you laugh for a reason because you're
laughing so hard. You're just you're shaking like a bowl
full of jelly. Right. Respiratory system is up is upset um.
In some cases you're actually crying um. You're you may
(12:48):
be struggling for breath. Your face becomes moist and red.
I mean you you you're having a full body episode.
And if you did not know what laughter is, if
you've grown up in a mystical land where there was
no humor and you saw all somebody laughing, you might
think it was some sort of a seizure. It's true.
And actually the speaking of seizure, I mean just kind
of go over how it's working in your brain. Your
(13:10):
brain's pre mort or cortical region is activated. And this
is important because this is the part of the brain
that stands up ready to react to sound. Then the
left side of your cerebral cortex interprets the content and
the structure of the piece of humor, and then the
right side of the cortex performs the analysis, enabling you
to get the joke. And then an electrical wave pulses
through your cerebral cortex about four tenths of a second later,
(13:33):
and you laugh if the wave takes a negative charge.
So already right there, you can see that there's a
very complex set of motions going on in your brain
and your body. And if you were to tell me, hey,
the government's working on a weapon that does just this
list of things to the human body, I'd be like, WHOA,
I'm not even sure if that's a non lethal weapon
that sounds potentially dangerous and a little that might be
(13:55):
outlawed by some sort of international convention, but it can
conceivably just be a real well told joke. And it's
true because we know that laughing sometimes will lead to
blacking out, and this is usually related to overbreathing, and
it's usually not too dangerous, but there are times when
you've got underlying conditions where it could actually become quite dangerous. Yes,
(14:17):
and we'll we'll get into that in a minute. But first,
people who have died or are said to have died
by laughter. I'm not going to run through all of them.
You can easily find a list of these accounts online,
but I'm gonna touch on a few of them here.
One important one, at least in the lore of dying
by laughter is Chrysippus. Chrystippus was amongst the most influential
(14:37):
philosophers of the Hellenistic period, and it had a huge
role on the development of stoicism, which is excellent because
you used tend to think of a stoic individual is
not necessarily being a person who's gonna engage in a
lot of laughter, much less a lethal dosage of laughter,
right is. It turns out there are two different stories
about it. How he died, and he died at the
age of seventy three, and and that was in two
(15:00):
two and six BC. Okay, that's a pretty advanced age
at that time. Yeah, of course, you know he's living.
He's like a philosopher. To be a specialized philosopher in
any age, it kind of implies that maybe you have
you know, not not to not philosophers, but you're not
gonna get crushed by a falling rock. Generally, you're not
gonna be doing a lot of hard labors where you're Yeah.
(15:20):
So anyway, one story is that Christmas just drank a
lot of wine at a feast, grew dizzy and died. Okay,
that's possible. But then there's another story that after an ass,
you know, a donkey, had eaten up his figs, he
cried out to an old woman, Now give the ass
a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs,
and then he laughed so heartily that he died. So um,
(15:45):
I just love that. From this period, it seems like
people are getting their pets in the farm animals drunk
a lot. Yes, you're thinking, of course of our friend,
uh Tico, Yeah, well actually who was later on? It's
still I kind of think that this is an absence
of any parlor games. You go ahead and get the
animal off the farm and start having it chugged something. Well,
(16:08):
it comes back to the duck, right. The whole reason
they asked the question, what's the most hilarious animal to
have doing human things and engaging in a human joke.
The duck is certainly the funniest, but there are other
funny creatures to how to do human things, and one
of them is the donkey. A donkey doing anything non
donkey is pretty hilarious. Likewise, the monkey, uh Like, it's
interesting if you look, go to a museum. Go to
(16:30):
a big museum next time, be on the lookout for
this particular motif, a monkey riding a horse. It's it's
generated laughter since time out of mind, since we've actually
ridden horses. Like, the idea that a monkey could do
it is just somehow instantly hilarious. You can read into
that way you will. Perhaps it's the the idea that
a monkey riding a horses is threatening. What if they
(16:51):
ride they'll be like Planet of the Apes, right, Or
maybe it's just the fact that we look down on
the monkey as something less than us, and the idea
that the monkey could do what we do is that
laughter zone for us. Well, it's like whenever I want
to make my daughter laugh, I'll just say like, hey,
do you think that car ahead of us? Do you
think that a cat's driving it? And then she'll start
laughing outside But it's wearing a bow tie, and it's
just because of up to Annie even more. Yeah, yeah,
(17:13):
the layers of ridiculousness, goats, cats, poppy, I mean, all
fair game for for laughter by by far anyway. So Chrysippus,
who knows there are two stories there. Certainly if he
was seventy three, I could imagine it's possible that he
died by laughter. It's you might have had, you know, again,
an underlying heart condition. There another guy of note from
(17:34):
the old world, well not as old world. We have
a man by the name of Martin of Aragon. Martin
was the King of Aragon, Valencia, Sardinia, Corsica and Count
of Barcelona from and king of Sicily from fourteen o nine,
and he died in fourteen ten. Okay, so what happened here?
(17:54):
The accounts say that he died due to a kind
of a mixture of serious indigestion and laughter. Now he
was only fifty six. And I think one possibility here
is that I was reading a little bit about heart attacks.
And you do have this situation where someone someone has only, say,
seen a heart attack on television. What do they think
(18:15):
of They think of Fred Sandford having the big one,
these Hollywood heart attacks. But in reality you can sometimes
have a heart attack, experience a heart attack, and you
might conceivably pass it off as innigestion because it's not
this Hollywood Fred Sanford stumbling around the room kind of situation.
So it seems to me, and I'm no, you know,
I'm not weighing in as an expert here, but it
(18:35):
seems to me it's it's likely that he may have
had a heart attack while laughing, and that's what killed.
Are you wearing that lab coat and saying that at
the same time, I totally believe you. That's why you
need to look expert. Yeah, um, yeah, it's very very possible.
And again this this is a sort of theme we
see when we look at more modern cases of and
(18:56):
who know. Again, anytime you're looking at a two possible
ways of person died, like ultimately, like, no one wants
to die laughing, but you gotta admit it sounds like
a good way to go. Like, if you got to
go out some way in it's little stressful, it might
as well be dying laughing. Yeah, there are many many
other ways that I wouldn't want to go out. So
you could see that where certainly centuries or millennia after
(19:17):
someone has died, the story might get shifted into a
happy year. Oh he was a stoic, but he died laughing.
It's just a great story, you know, which brings us
to more modern times. There have been a few instances,
but the most interesting one, the one that has been
more closely studied certainly has become part of comedy lore,
has to do with the older show called The Goodies,
which I was not familiar with this. Were you familiar
(19:39):
with the Goodies? No? But just the entire situation and
what this person was laughing at I couldn't help yeah,
but be tickled by. I mean, it's unfortunate for the
person who passed away from laughter at this. But we're
talking about this good the Goodies, which is a TV show,
and uh, we're talking about nineteen right, fifty year old
brick player Alex Mitchell in England. He actually kicked the
(20:04):
bucket while roaring with laughter at one of these shows Goodies.
And do you want to describe this? Oh the sketches,
because okay, so The Goodies is basically three dudes, um
one or more of them went to college with the
guys in Monty Python, so they kind of shared a
similar love of the absurd, and it's certainly absurd to watch. Again.
(20:25):
I've never seen any of this and I don't have
any nostalgia for it. So if you're a big fan
of the goodies out there right in, I'd love to
hear your take on it. But this particular sketch that
arguably killed Alex Mitchell was a kung Fu caper sketch. Uh.
And this is a nineteen seventy five kung fu is
big and everyone's excited about it and doing songs and whatnot.
In this surreal sketch, you have a man from Lancashire
(20:50):
battling via kung fu Scottish bagpipers. There's a man in
black face as an American boxer. There's a mime like
a French mine. There's an Australian with a boomerang. So
it's like a battle like a kung Fu battle of
weird kind of distasteful stereotypes. I mean, well, isn't there
there's putting involved? Right? This is I think the pudding
(21:11):
is what I was like, what what is going on?
The Lancashire mode of martial arts and this is called
ikey thump and it involves palting opponents with black pudding. Okay,
so the white stripes, which I can only assume there's
some sort of correlation here. There's some sort of nutty
(21:32):
white stripes. Okay, So yeah, this guy is watching this. Yeah,
and you know, unfortunately, after twenty five minutes of laughing,
he actually, according to his wife, gave a tremendous belly
laugh and then keeled over. Yes, um, yeah, what a
way to go. And it wasn't just that he was
laughing so very hard that he expired, you know, from
(21:54):
a heart attack. It was actually that he had an
unusual inheritable heart rhythm disorder called long QT syndrome. Yeah
Qt like the gas station, yes, quick trip. And this
actually again keep showing up again and again that there's
some sort of underlying heart condition. And I did want
to mention the Danish audiologist. Have you heard about this guy?
(22:17):
He died laughing in nine while watching a fish called Wanda.
That now that I can I can get because there's
some death and again the python element, I know, see
it is dangerous. Right. When the film was shown in
theaters in Denmark, Ole Benson, the audiologist, laughed himself to
death during this scene where Ken gets chips stuck up
(22:37):
his nose or rather, um, I can't remember the Auto character, Yeah,
Kevin Klein's character. I think it is Auto sticks French
fries also called chips right up his nose. So Benson
is watching this, His heart rate went between two hundred
and fifty five hundred beats per minute, and he eventually
succumbed to cardiac arrest, and his family theorizes that the
(22:57):
scene reminded him of a thing only dinner a few
years earlier, when Old put a piece of cauliflower up
his and everyone uh in his family's noses as a
joke and made a bet with them on who could
eat up their carrots without cauliflower falling out. So they
think that the scene with Ken and the chips really
sort of insited this crazy laughter because he was remembering
(23:21):
his own scene. Yeah, it's very sad, I gotta say,
But Fish Called Wanted is a very very funny movie. Yeah,
but in this case Mitchell QT syndrome. Cardiac arrests triggered
by exertion, adrenaline, or a strong emotional response didn't always
shut down the person entirely. Sometimes the heart resets itself
after five or six beats. But they figured that this
(23:43):
was what was the heart of it when they diagnosed
his daughter with it, and it's an hereditary condition. So
the doctors at that point said, well, this, this is
clearly the leading candidate for how this goody sketch did
him in. And you know, we were talking about it
being a good way to die, as good as any
of them are, and certainly his his wife, his his widow,
(24:03):
she continues to have a rather positive viewing of this,
Like she actually wrote the guys in the Goodies and said, hey, my, my,
my husband. He was always a huge fan and he
died laughing at your show. And you know this is
before we became a very litigious society. I have to
say this nineteen I don't know that if the same
thing would happen today. There's another person too that we
(24:25):
have an example of this is the ice cream truck
driver in Thailand. He actually died in his sleep, laughing,
and his wife said that she tried to wake him up,
but he kept laughing, and then autopsy suggested that he
might have had a heart attack. So not only dying
in your sleep, but you're dying while you're you know,
presumably having a really funny dream. Yes, and then we
(24:48):
also should mention laughter induced asthma. This is not really
a strong candidate for killing anyone. Laughter induced asthma. More
than half of people with asthma report that their symptoms
are brought on by laughter. This according to a two
thousand five from n YU Medical Center in New York.
Asthma that's triggered by laughter usually doesn't seem to cause
serious asthma flare ups compared to other types of asthma.
(25:09):
But the study did suggest that laughter induced asthma maybe
a sign that your asthma isn't as well controlled as
it could be. So it's more of a more of
a warning sign that you you need to adjust your
management of your asthma than anything else. Before we get
into pathological laughter, I want to mention one more thing
that can contribute to not lethal laughter, but certainly an
issue where laughter shuts down the body and interesting ways,
(25:32):
and that is a cataplexy. This involves a sudden loss
of voluntary muscle tone that may be triggered by strong emotions.
That's often a symptom of narcolepsy, which is a chronic
disorder of the central nervous system characterized by the brains
and ability to control your your sleep wake cycles. It
can occur spontaneously, but is often triggered by against sudden
(25:52):
strong emotions such as fear, anger, stress, excitement, or humor.
So laughter is reportedly the most common cause of this.
And if this is ring any bells for anyone out there,
there was an episode of This American Life a few
years back about a neuroscientist by the name of Matt
Frecking who suffers from cataplexy attacks when he's happy. So
it was a real one of these really down er,
(26:14):
somber episodes of This American Life because he's a happily
married man but he has to limit his joy because
his body shuts down when he experiences too much happiness
in his life. That's just awful, it is. It's a
great episode. So look that one up. Just look up
Matt threking F R E K I N G and
(26:34):
This American Life and you'll find that episode. Well, I mean,
you know, because we're all seeking joy and happiness all
the time, right to think that you'd have to actually
tamp that down. Yeah, it's like he's uh, you know,
in a way, it's like enforced Buddhism in a kind
of interested manner, you know about trying to steer yourself
clear of extremes. But yeah, it's that's rough, all right. Um,
(26:55):
you had mentioned pathological laughter. Now, this, according to the
Mayo Clinic, is laughter that can stem from a variety
of neurological disorders, and it can make it extremely difficult,
sometimes impossible for individuals to control their laughter, even if
they see no humor in a situation. And in some cases,
this pathological laughing can switch to pathological crying and the
(27:19):
person cannot do anything about it. And that's that's the
thing about this is again there's the context maybe completely
like you could be in a job interview and begin
this pathological laughing or crying. It seems to occur most
frequently among people with something called amniotrophic lateral sclerosis, and
this is a disease of cerebral and spinal nerve cells.
(27:40):
And then almost half of these patients have these PLC symptoms,
So they're not exactly sure what is the mechanism that
is creating this sort of disorder, but uh, you know,
they're looking more into it. Yeah, PLC pathological laughter and crying,
and that the take come here is that it's a
disturbance of feeling rather than a disturbance of emotions. So
(28:02):
it's not that you know, so if you know anyone
or encounter anyone that has this, it's not that they're
setting there thinking, oh my god, funerals are hilarious. No,
it's this that like they're feeling the authentic emotions, are
feeling what they should feel in the scenario, and what
comes out that's where the disconnect happens. Now, there is
this idea that, um, it could be a serotonin imbalance,
(28:23):
and they think that because researchers have had some positive
results with antidepressants like the selective serotonin re uptake inhibitors.
So again they're still looking into this, but um, they
don't know a whole lot yet. In a lot of
these conditions to it comes down to lesions and tumors
that are disinhibiting laughter and crying centers of the brain.
(28:43):
They're basically altering the neural network necessary for what we
think of is normal responses situations. Yeah, I remember one
article that you had sent me that it was about
a two year old who had a lesion and at
the time the mother didn't know it. She just like
even the two year old was laughing hysterically out of context,
and they finally figured out. Now I believe they operated
(29:04):
and the child was okay. But yeah, I can definitely
disturb what seems to be your personality. Yeah, there's a
really interesting YouTube video that I'll definitely embed on the
blog post accompanying this website. The number of you may
have seen, there's a Dutch interview and on the YouTube
you can you can click a little tab that will
actually bring up subtitles for it, so it's not just
(29:26):
people in another language, you know, doing a thing. But
there was a dutchman by the name of hoog Boss
and the whole thing is an interview with him and
his wife, and the whole time he's laughing hysterically. Um,
and this being the first time you see him, Like
you you know, we've talked about how laughter is contagious,
so you see this man just laughing his head off,
and you're like, this guy's hilarious, he's fun. He's look
(29:48):
at him. He's clutching like an Ernie doll at one point.
But his wife is sitting there the whole time just
is done with She is over it. She has the
most sour look on her face. And you're right at
the beginning, you're like, oh, man, he's he's great, he's warm,
he's funny. Why he's your husband, and he's laughing all
the time, But so what? And then a couple of
minutes into it, you realize how frustrating it must be
(30:09):
for her because he laughs all the time. His response
to everything is laughter, except when he hears the national
anthem and then yeah, when he hears Holland's national national anthem.
But now this is what I don't think they actually
got to the absolute bottom of. But they suspect that
this occurred because he had an operation and they think
that the anesthesia may have altered, you know, neurologically the
(30:34):
way that he his laughter response is coming in and
because you know, his wife says, this didn't happen before
the operation, and again it is it is hilarious to watch,
but it's also kind of sad too, because he doesn't
really give a straight answer. You know, he talks, but
you can't really tell if he's just trying to tamp
down his own laughter or perhaps there's something else going
(30:56):
on there right now. And again, this is a situation
or someone who's laughing at at everything except in the
national anthem. But there is an interesting study you came across,
the Seinfeld study. An individual that is reacting with hysterical
pathological laughter but only to a particular thing or a
particular a very narrow segment of comedy. Yeah, it's called
(31:20):
the Seinfeld syncope. And it's basically a fainting episode through laughter.
And it was called the Seinfeld sincope because there have
been a couple of instances where people were watching Seinfeld
and know only Seinfeld and laughing to such a degree
that they began to faint. But what is going on
here is that the show is actually revealing that there's
(31:41):
a potentially serious problem in the person. The one guy
who was sixty two years old, he had a history
of hypertension, hyper cholesterol, lemmia, he had a coronary bypass,
and he was a smoker, and although he received enough
blood to the brain when he was calm, when he
laughed hysterically, he experienced a normal physiological phenomenon called the
(32:01):
Valsalva maneuver. Now, when this happens, you get forced expiration
against a closed airway, resulting in increased pressure in the
chest that affects the heart output inside, like the yoga
breath where you like, uh, school breath. Is that we're
talking about um breath of fire? Yeah, maybe in a
way that I don't know if it's the exact same thing.
(32:23):
But in the other yes, is the kin to it
and that is causing this pressure. And because he had
blocked arteries coming off of the Aorita, this Valsavia maneuver
reduced the blifflow to his brain in and caused him
to faint. Now what he was watching specifically was the
character of George Costanza, by the way, Yeah, I found
that that. I mean, that was what was so interesting
(32:45):
that it was. It was not just only Seinfeldt, but
it was like one character on Seinfeldt that was really
causing this for him. And I could see if it
was the Marine Biologist episode, because I really like that boy.
Well he was pretending to be a marine and then
the whale washed up. You know, always fun to see
George unmasked. But I don't know who knows which one
it was. But again, not so much that Seinfeld un
(33:06):
Seinfeld was funny, but but not so much that there
was something about seinfeld that was that was impacting people's health,
but the individuals had something askew in their own physiology
that made them susceptible to this attack. And just real quick,
it's worth noting that you also see things like Angelman
syndrome Tourette syndrome. Both of these carried laughters of symptom.
You often see patholytical laughter occurring as a symptom. So
(33:28):
it's not, oh, well, that person's laughs all the time.
It's no, that person laughs all the time. Let's get
to the bottom of it. So Tourette syndrome is a
neurobiological disorder that causes the combination of ticks and involuntary
vocal outbursts. This is we could do a whole podcast
on Tourette's. But this is one that is often misrepresented
to a large extent, and this is certainly in comedy.
(33:49):
It's people come back to and use it as a
as part of a comedy act, which is someone shouting obscenities.
But that's a rather simplistic look at what that condition
actually is. And then Angelman syndrome is a rare chromosome,
a disorder that affects the nervous system. So people with
this condition usually can't speak and display a quote happy,
excitable demeanor with frequent smiling and laughter. M okay, So
(34:12):
there you have it, death by laughter, the possibility of
death by laughter. I guess the will take home here
is that you probably could not craft a joke so
funny that it would You would have difficulty even crafting
a joke to target a particular individual, like an assassin's
bullet of a joke, like if you wanted to take
(34:33):
out us fitting head of state and you put a
lot of research and all right, what do they find funny?
What's there? What's their heart condition? Like? What you know?
How healthy are they? If you put that much work
in it, you could perhaps incapacitate them a little bit, maybe,
but it would be very difficult to actually craft the
killing joke. Yeah, it would be very very hard. Now
do you remember in the Monty Python's get about the
(34:53):
World's myth dangerous joke, the killing joke, what the Germans
tried to craft In response, No, I don't, and they
over the radio there were sweet peanuts fucking down Distrasse
and Vaughan Vos assaulted peanut. It is really funny, it's
a pretty good, like it's funny watching the reaction that
(35:16):
people who are listening to it over the radio because
they're just they're just their faces are blank. And but
it is absurd. Is that sketches. It really does drive
home the how the absurdity like humor is one of
those things that doesn't necessarily cross to other languages all
that well. I often feel like British humor I totally get.
I share the language with it. If I turn on
the Spanish TV network and I happened to catch some
(35:38):
of that. Sometimes I'll see some of the slapstick and
it's making sense. But then I seem to have like
a real disconnect with Japanese humor, Like I love a
lot of media that comes this way from Japan, but
but when I encounter humor it often I often feel like, wow,
this is not speaking to me, Like my I don't
have the right cultural wavelengths set. What about do you
think there's a French humor? Oh yeah, yeah, okay, tell
(36:00):
me tell me about what you think the French humor is. Well,
I mean the stereotype, of course, is the French love
Jerry Lewis. Yeah, but that's an American I mean certainly
have like the roots of of mime and uh, and
you have puppetry is of course big street puppetry. To
see some it's not punching Judy in France, they have
another name. But I have seen some some French puppetry
(36:22):
in that vein and it's it's hilarious. But I don't know.
I think if we look close enough, we'd find that
even French humor is more diverse than we think. You know, oh,
I'm sure, I'm sure. I'm just thinking that's not really
known as as a big export for France, so just
just curious. I tend to think the French this is
just a huge generation. I think they like grotesque looking
men doing ridiculous things, but I think that probably the
(36:44):
same for most cultures. Yeah, all right, Well that's the
episode we'd love to hear from you guys and gals
out there. If you have any personal experience with with
deadly laughter or with any of these conditions that we've
mentioned here, we'd really love to hear some insider insight
on that and what it's like to live with it,
(37:05):
or if you just have thoughts in general about laughter.
Responding to this episode or our previous episode about the
healing power of laughter. We've kind of given you the
the yen and the yang here looking at laughter. Is
this this physiological um mental event that in the right
or wrong situations, can go either way? So reach out
to us. You can find us on Facebook, where we
are Stuff to Blow Your Mind. We're also stuff to
(37:26):
Blow your Mind on Tumblr, and you can follow us
on Twitter under the handle blow the Mind. And you
can also drop us a line at blow the Mind
at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
(37:50):
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