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