Everyone loves laughing. It brings us joy, heals us, and brings us together like nothing else. The world indeed needs more laughter, and they say that laughter cures all ills. Yet what if the illness itself is laughter? What if you just started laughing one day and could not stop until you were incapacitated? They say laughter is contagious, and indeed Charles Dickens once famously said “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter,” but what if this was all quite literal, and that it could be a type of disease? That is what seemed to happen in one remote African village back in 1962, when people began breaking out into a contagious laughter that would not stop, and go on to become a true modern mystery.