The Humor Code (15 page)

So far, it seems he's on to something. He found the 50-kilohertz chirping changed when one of the animals involved in rough-and-tumble play was much larger than the other, when it was no longer fun and games and instead outright bullying—or as Pete would say, when the physical violations were no longer benign. And when given a choice, Burgdorf's rats would push a bar to play a recording of the
50-kilohertz chirp as opposed to other rat noises, suggesting they had a preference for the sound. Finally, when Burgdorf and his colleagues used electrodes, opiates, and other manipulations to stimulate the reward centers of rats' brains, the rats produced that same laughter-like noise.

And now, here in this lab, with its key-card-required security doors and freezers of bio samples and warning signs for radioactive materials, Burgdorf is using his rats and their special squeaks to test a new depression medication designed to increase positive mood. Clinical trials are already in phase two, and if all goes well, the drug might hit the shelves in three or four years. That's right: Big Pharma is using laughing rats to develop a happy pill.

Tickle-loving rats, joke-playing gorillas, even stories of dog laughter—these reports could just be the beginning, said Marc Bekoff when we met him at a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado. Bekoff, a colleague of Pete's at the University of Colorado, where he's a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, is one of the world's foremost experts on animal emotions. And he, for one, believes we're on the cusp of discovering that lots of animals have a sense of humor, maybe even all mammals. He pointed to Darwin's idea that the difference between human and animal intelligence is a matter of degree, not of kind. Or as Bekoff put it, “If we have a sense of humor, then non-human animals should have a sense of humor, too.” Considering the groundbreaking discoveries that ethologists like Bekoff are making about animal behavior, from dogs understanding unfairness to baby spiders displaying different temperaments to bees being taught to be pessimistic, the idea of thousands of inherently funny species might not be all that far-fetched.

Unfortunately, cruising through the wild kingdom of Rubondo Island in our safari jeep, we don't spot any chimps, rats, dogs, or other animals to tickle. So we park the vehicle by a guesthouse near the water, and Rutta suggests the three of us go bushwhacking. We set off into the woods, climbing over tree trunks and pushing through foliage, hot on the trail of . . . well, anything at all safari-worthy. Along the way, Rutta points out a heaping pile of elephant dung, which Pete nearly steps in. Then Pete tries swinging Tarzan-style from a hanging
vine, and somehow doesn't end up killing himself. After that, Rutta guides us to a shallow cave in a cliffside he's visited before, pointing out a collection of bones scattered about its floor. “Dead people,” he explains, remnants of a time when foreigners like us weren't so welcome on the island. Now I'm starting to wonder about those rifles our escorts brought along.

“If I don't almost get eaten, I will be disappointed,” declares Pete as we tromp through the underbrush. A few minutes later, I feel a stinging pain on my leg, then another. Looking down, I find black soldier ants swarming my feet and legs, crawling into my shoes and under my socks and biting hard any time they come across skin. Pete's covered in them, too. We slap at our legs, cursing in pain as the little buggers make a meal of our calves. Meanwhile Rutta, diligent safari guide that he is, pulls out his camera and starts taking photos of our misery.

Our walk in the jungle a bust, we return to the guesthouse and try a different tack: we pay the pilot of a small dinghy moored by the shore to take us around the island's shoreline. Motoring along the coast, we find wildlife: cormorants and egrets and ibis perched by the shore, African fish eagles swooping overhead, hippo snouts bobbing among the waves, and giant crocodiles slipping into the greenish water as we cruise by. Off in the distance, we glimpse a freakish sight: gigantic black clouds rising from the water's surface, as if the lake were on fire. These are African lake flies, explains Rutta, hatching by the millions. But then our pilot notices another kind of cloud forming overhead—storm clouds.

He turns the boat around and heads back, but he's not fast enough to outrun the storm. The wind whips up, and rain begins pelting our faces. The pilot guns the outboard motor, but that just sends more water sloshing into the boat. The rain beats down harder and harder, and soon we're plowing through an endless gray curtain of water. “These are three-foot, four-foot swells!” hollers Pete over the engine as the dinghy rocks wildly back and forth in the waves. Suddenly, in the midst of our soggy misery, I start laughing. Maybe it's the absurdity of the situation, or maybe I'm going insane with fear. Either way, Pete joins in, and Rutta does, too. Here we are, facing a possible
watery grave in the middle of Lake Victoria, and we're cackling like maniacs. And we can't seem to stop.

We make it back to shore just as the squall moves on. As the sun reemerges from the clouds, we strip to our pants and lay out our waterlogged clothes out on the shore to dry. “I was thinking, ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing?' until I heard you laugh,” Pete tells me as we stretch out in the sun, his iPod blasting more 1990s hip-hop. “It's an example of how laughter signals things are okay.”

Rutta has another interpretation. “It's
omuneepo
!” he declares, nodding his head to Biggie Smalls.

When the Kashasha
boarding school shut down during the laughter outbreak in 1962, the schoolgirls went home—and along with them went
omuneepo
. At Rwamishenye girls' middle school just outside Bukoba, a third of the 154 pupils came down with symptoms after several of the Kashasha students returned to their homes nearby. That school closed, too, and one of the pupils from that institution returned to her village twenty miles away, where she spread the ailment to her family, including a relative who'd walked ten miles to witness the symptoms. Soon two boys' schools nearby were overrun and shut down, too. “At the time of writing this paper the disease is spreading to other villages, the education of the children is being seriously interfered with, and there is considerable fear among the village communities,” noted Rankin and Philip in their
Central African Journal of Medicine
article. There's no indication when, exactly, the laughing finally stopped or how many people were affected, but some reports put the total at approximately 1,000 victims.

No community suffered as much as Nshamba, a village southwest of Bukoba. There, according to Rankin and Philip, 217 villagers came down with the ailment after several of the Kashasha schoolgirls returned to their area homes. So, on a rainy African morning with gray clouds hanging low overhead, we roll into Nshamba, a busy community crisscrossed by red dirt roads.

Since many of the victims were young women, we head off in search of female villagers. We find a group in front of a coffee co-op,
kneeling on a tarp and sorting by hand through large mounds of green coffee beans, looking for runts. Yes, they tell us through Rutta, they know of the laughing disease. One of them even suffered from it: the woman in the corner in the brown hairnet. We're eager to hear more, but the women turn back to their work, ignoring us. We're flummoxed, until Rutta explains that they're thirsty. They could use some sodas.

We catch on. Pete wanders over to a local shop and returns with a crate of Pepsis, Fantas, and Sprites. The women cheer. Once they've cracked open their soda-pop bribes with their teeth, they are eager to chat. We sit down with the woman in the brown hairnet, who tells us she came down with the disease in July 1996. She felt a pain in her back and head and then, three days later, lost control of her body—laughing, crying, speaking in strange languages. Only when she was taken to the hospital and given a shot of quinine did she recover.

This wasn't
omuneepo
, says Rutta. It was cerebral malaria. His second brother came down with it, causing him to run around like a maniac until he collapsed in exhaustion.

Our search through the town continues, past free-range chickens scurrying about and women eyeing us from doorsteps, chewing bits of sugarcane. We learn that the person we should talk to is a woman named Amelia. We're told she was the first person in Nshamba to come down with the ailment once it was brought here by the schoolgirls. When she recovered she became a healer, treating others with the disease. There's only one problem: Amelia now lives far away from here, we're told, in a distant part of the region. And she's crazy.

Meanwhile, children have been gathering about us, drawn by the spectacle of the two white guys, apparently not a common sight. As we make our way back to the van, they break out in singing: “
Mzungu
, eh, eh, eh!
Mzungu
, eh, eh, eh!” Whether the song's making fun of us or not, Pete joins in the festivities, jumping about wildly as the small children laugh with glee.

These children, as young as they are, see the humor in what's going on here: two
mzungus
, out of their element, dancing about like maniacs. Laughter develops in infants far earlier than language, usually between just ten and twenty weeks of age. (Aristotle was off when he declared babies begin laughing on their fortieth day.) To be
clear, what these babies are laughing at isn't humor as we understand it; they just find certain stimuli pleasurable. (For those stuck alone with their baby nephew without any idea of what to do with him, take note: according to observational studies of what 150 infants in the first year of life laughed at, kissing the kiddo's tummy and playing “I'm gonna get you!” are winners. Bouncing the tyke on your knee? Not so much—nor is it very safe.)
¹⁶

According to Paul McGhee, who has spent years studying how humor develops, children don't begin to recognize things as funny until about halfway through age two. That's when they understand that objects have meanings that can be rearranged in funny ways (like using a banana like a telephone). But that's not the end of it. According to McGhee, there are still three other developmental humor stages to come. Early in their third year, kids typically start using their developing language skills to mislabel objects, similar to the way I still inanely point to horses I see on long car trips and call them cows, just to piss off my wife, Emily. Then soon after, children grasp conceptual humor, based on the idea that objects have attributes that can be rearranged in an amusing fashion. And by this point, these kids are laughing all the time. Studies of five-year-olds have shown they laugh, on average, 7.7 times per hour, while the average American adult laughs just eighteen times a day.
¹⁷

At around seven years, children develop the ability to juggle multiple concepts and meanings in their minds at once, so they finally get the whole shebang: plays on words, double meanings, puns, and complicated jokes.
¹⁸
Still, children often need several more years under their belts before they fully get the joke behind tricky concepts like irony and satire. That's not too surprising, considering that sarcasm is often so difficult to grasp, even for adults, that there are efforts afoot to create new forms of punctuation to indicate it. That includes the SarcMark, which looks like an upside-down “e” with an eyeball. This, to us, is a great idea.

As obvious outsiders in Nshamba, it's to our advantage to joke and laugh not just with these kids, but with grown-ups here, too. That's because laughter and humor are powerful social signals, indicating to the world in big, bold letters that things are okay. As sociologist Rose
Coser once put it, “Laughter and humor are indeed like an invitation, be it an invitation for dinner, or an invitation to start a conversation: it aims at decreasing social distance.” Humor and laughing are so good at this, so adept at increasing positive feelings and social intimacy, that they seem to operate like a remote control, with someone else's mind as your personal boob tube. A few years ago, researchers in London had people listen to laughter while an fMRI scanner monitored their brain response. They found that just the sound of chuckling, without any humor at all, was enough to trigger neurons in the part of the brain that controls the muscles for smiling and laughing. Scientists have labeled these cells “mirror neurons,” since they mirror the behavior being observed. Negative sounds, such as screaming and retching, also activated corresponding mirror neurons, but at a weaker level.
¹⁹

No wonder the crews of professional laughers we auditioned for in Los Angeles are in such high demand to help get sitcom audiences chuckling. Here was more scientific proof that laughter really is contagious.

But when you joke or laugh, you do more than just make those around you prone to laughter, too. Because humor helps you come off as less threatening and more socially attractive, it can help convince others, in an almost voodoo-like way, of all sorts of unreasonable things. In one study, people trying to bargain down the price of a landscape painting were willing to accept a higher cost if the person on the other side of the negotiating table cracked, “I'll throw in my pet frog.”
²⁰
In another experiment, people listened to a speech that had been intentionally disorganized, with nearly a third of all sentences rearranged randomly. Those who heard a version that included jokes throughout the discourse rated it more organized than its equally muddled counterpart.
²¹
So now, if we can use humor to convince people in Nshamba that we, a couple of white guys asking odd questions about some half-forgotten mysterious ailment, aren't up to no good? All the better.