On January 30th, 1962, an all-girls boarding school in Kashasha, Tanganyika, witnessed one of the oddest types of mass hysteria ever recorded in human history: The Laughter Epidemic. This epidemic, ...

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When I was little, I tended to fall into bouts of uncontrollable laughter. Basically, once I started laughing, I found it very difficult to stop. The problem was particularly acute in contexts where I ...

Melanin Bee curves her spine like a stretching cat as she lets out a maniacal, forced laugh. The quick-fire pattern of manufactured giggles —“oh, hoo hoo hoo, eeh, ha ha ha”— soon ripples into genuine ...

While laughing is a shared human trait, there are surprising gender differences in how and why people do it. Some feel that the purpose of laughter is to strengthen human bonds. Men and women both ...