Last night CNN presented a segment on a sect that calls itself the
Holy Laughter
movement. Their pastor tells jokes and claims that laughter is a trance controlled by God. He claims that unlike other christian movements, his church does not implant feelings of guilt, but of happiness.
Many churches are reporting spontaneous, uncontrollable laughter erupting from their congregations, even during times of solemn ceremony or messages from the pulpit. Some report uncontrollable, yelling, falling to the floor in ecstatic trances, and animal noises such as barking like dogs and roaring like lions. Last night's CNN segment on TV indeed showed a church service filled with uncontrolable laughter. Many fall from their chairs or stagger and reel like drunken people, unable to walk a straight line. For simplicity's sake, all these have come to be called "holy laughter," since laughter is the preeminent phenomenon displayed. In simple terms, its pastor declared that these physical manifestations are "attributed to absolute control by the Holy Spirit....as was manifested once in Tanzania".
A Google search on laughing epidemic brough this documented case:
Laughing epidemic
Kashasha, Tanzania - Africa (1962) - T
he laughing epidemic seems to have started within a small group of students in a boarding school , possibly triggered by a joke. Laughter , as is commonly known, is in some sense contagious, and for whatever reason in this case the laughter perpetuated itself, far transcending its original cause. Since it is physiologically impossible to laugh for much more than a few minutes at a time, the laughter must have made itself known sporadically, though reportedly it was incapacitating when it struck. The school from which the epidemic sprang was shut down; the children and parents transmitted it to the surrounding area. Other schools, Kashasha itself, and another village, comprising thousands of people, were all affected to some degree. Six to eighteen months after it started, the phenomenon died off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_Laughter_Epidemic