The Killing Joke

I would say here and there. It probably wasn't until I was more of a teenager that I really sort of dabbled in it yourself strict diet I'm imagining for a short period of time, definitely like junior High. There was a period in there where they were showing it regularly on on the Comedy Network whatever it was called at the time, and and I was this totally new

thing to me, so I just ate it up. And then then of course me and my friends got into Money Python, the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, all that, and just it consumed us for a while and and definitely had a big impact on my sense of human I think most people of my age and the earlier generation as well. But but there's something about being it just the right age, just at the right time when all of it was on TV, and you just you couldn't help it absorb it. Now, did you ever go

lowbrow and put a little Benny Hill in there? Um, you know, if Benny Hill was on and you're at that age where aspects of Benny Hill's show definitely appeal to young male minds. But and it's ultimately I mean, it was a little body but it was so silly, like all those chase scenes they do kind of suck you in a bit. But I don't I don't even I guess they were showing that on Comedy Central as well.

But today we are talking particularly about one sketch, and we're gonna roll out the science from this one sketch and uh, you can probably guess what it's gonna be. We're gonna play a quick clip from it here, and then we'll talk about it. This man is Ernest Scribbler, writer of jokes. In a few moments he will have written the funniest joe in the world, and as a consequence, he will die laughing. Kay, all right, we're talking, of course, about the joke that kills people, the killer joke, the

joke that in this sketch is ultimately weaponized. Um they end up having it. Anyone who hears it laughs himself to death, and so they have to get people to translate it into German. This is during World War two. Get separate people to translate segments of the joke because no one can read the whole thing at once or they'll die. But there too, there wasn't one instance in this story that they had two words that were translated. Yes,

they were hospital as yes. So you have to be careful because because the joke and its entirety will kill you. It's so funny, and even just a little segment, like maybe just the punch line is enough to do unit. So they had to send in. They had to break it up into different words, have translators translate each word, and then reassemble it in German. And it was in

utilized on the front lines in World War two. They would have somebody who did not understand German read the joke aloud, and then any German imagtryment that happened to hear it would just die laughing right there. So go ahead and go ahead and read it for us. And just a quick warning if you speak German watch out, this might have harmful effects. Yeah, just I mean, maybe even just turn it off for a moment. All right, that's a joke. Joke. Warfare, Vinish does, Nontrika Baron does,

all the deflippers bolt. See. Now I couldn't understand it, or I would have I would have died. Now. I laughed at that just because I enjoyed the German nous of it, and your and your accent was was was excellent. Yeah, But of course anyone who actually speaks German they recognize that those are not all real German words. This is ultimately nonsense and gibberish. Because they couldn't. They didn't actually have a joke at the center of this. The content

of the joke is a mcguffin. There's a lot of fiction that they create around it, just saying that if you hear this joke, if you understand it, it kills you dead. But one can't help. But wonder, is it possible to have a joke that's so funny that it kills people? Right, It's possible. It's possible. But of course that would be uh sort of sort of complicated underlying conditions here right now, First of all, you would have to have an exceedingly funny joke, like the funniest joke possible,

and how would we possibly find that. Well, in two thousand two, some researchers actually looked into this and uh. It took place at the University of Herefordshire, psychology professor Richard Wiseman started a program called laugh app. The objective find the funniest joke across all cultures, regions, demographics, countries, the funniest joke that then can be unleashed, I guess

on on the world for global domination. Well maybe not the global domination part, but he was interested in what makes people tick and certainly what how senses of humor vary among different groups as well. So they set up a website and they spent a year collecting jokes. People would share their favorite jokes, they're the funniest joke they

knew on this website. Other people would come in and rate the jokes and uh and so over time the website received forty thousand jokes and one point five million ratings from all over. They got some international press exposures, so lots of people were chiming in. So of the forty thousand jokes submitted. The winner was won by a guy mean the name of Girpele Gosseil, which which right there, a thirty one year old psychiatrist from Manchester, England, and

the joke went something like this. Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whip side his phone and calls the emergency services. He guess, my friend is dead. What can I do? The operator says, calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead. There's a silence, then a gunshot is heard back on the phone. The guy says, okay, now what now you see I don't know. That wasn't

I That wasn't my favorite. I have to say, yeah, he doesn't. And I think that's maybe something worth noting here is that you have such varied senses of humor that if you find something that everyone agrees on, or the vast majority of people agree on, it's not gonna be good. It's like it's like hotel food. The hotel food or food that's catered at a hotel event, it has to be palpable by various um senses of taste, various aversions to spices. It has to meet all these

different dietary requirements. So when you check everything off the list, you can end up with some pretty bland fair right. Yeah, and you're right, this is across all cultures. This was the winning choke. But I did think it was interesting that there are a different cultural tasting in humor. And according to the study, people from the Republic of Ireland, the UK, Australia and New Zealand I'll express a strong preference for jokes involving word play, which sort of makes sense.

I mean, if you if you think, especially when I think about Irish humor. Um, so here you want to read that one, I'm gonna say, here's an example from that study. Uh that that placed this doctor. I've got a strawberry stuck up my bum. Doctor says I've got some cream for that. Now, that one when I when I read it and heard it again, that one made me laugh a little more. I have to say, well and stuck up my bomb. Right, There's just it's funny stuff.

It's a good material. Yeah. So the study figuring out some interesting things about jokes in general, Like they found that the perfect length of the joke is around a hundred words. That the best animal to place uh in a in a person's role, The best anthroomorphized animal to feature in a joke is the duck, which which I

think is perfect. There's always the joke you can make lots of There's lots of word play to be made with the ducks bill, you know, putting it on the ducks bill, and and ducks are always walking into bars, you know how. Um, And they found that this was interesting to that Germans appreciate a wide variety of humor. Yes, and immediately thought, oh, well, I remember when Seinfeld played in Germany and there was all of this kerfuffle because um, it was poled. It just didn't do that well that

the TV series Seinfeld in Germany. But so I immediately thought, oh, well, you know, you know, let me do just a sweeping generalization. Perhaps they don't have the sense of humor that other people do. But it turns out that they actually have a more nuanced and complex sense of humor. Well that's

what they say. And Okay. On one hand, there's like the stereotypical German that we all sort of get decided a German is a very serious, regimented person, and maybe they're not that inclined to humor, despite the fact that they do have all puppet hip hop acts in Berlin.

But when I was there briefly on like a school trip back in high school, I I distinctly remember turning on the German TV and even then I was I was expecting some you know, sort of Sprockets esque kraft Work, e German nous, And there was a comedy on, for sure. It was on in the lobby of this this hotel, and it was some. It was really Binny Hill esque and reminiscent of the the really outlandish humor that you'll

see on various Spanish television um sides. So so that alone let me know that, yes there's some they're not all German humors necessarily going to be that complex, uh, And I would like to study that out. They like a wide variety of things, so stereotypes are a little elusive,

I guess in figuring all of that out. Although to continue to talk about stereotypes, I should mention that in terms of cultural taste, Americans and Canadians tend to prefer jokes that are trade on the theme of superiority, either you know, sort of making fun of it or elevating it. Um. Here's an example. A Texans says where are you from? And Harvard grad says, I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions. And then

the Texans says, okay, where are you from? Jackass? And actually, my I've heard my father in law tell this before some sort of version of it, so I thought that was interesting. And then there's a computer generated joke that actually made the cut here because the researchers wanted to insert some computer generated jokes to see how they would do, and they put five of the jokes in there. Four of them fell flat, but one of them was successful. Do you know that one? Oh? Yes, yes, we have

it right here. What kind of murderer has moral fiber? A serial killer? I love it. I gotta tell you, I don't know what that says about my sense of humor, but that's funny. Well, that gag scored higher than one third of all human jokes, so I guess it's you know, the Peter world that robots are the kind of stand up comedians. They get up there, they're gonna they're gonna throw stuff out there. There's just gonna fail, but when they hit it, you know it's going to be well.

That kind of also harkens back to our episode on computers and creativity and their ability to actually make something that is novel. But anyway, there you go, here's the

research about the funniest joke in the world. You know, obviously no one was going to die from laughing, but this, this term we even have dying of laughter is something that has been with us for centuries, and you can actually place it back in um in Taming of the Shrew around six when Shakespeare wrote went they not quickly, I should die with laughing, which really sort of means if they hadn't left soon, I would have died laughing.

So it's been around for a while, this idea that we could laugh so hard that we could expire from it. And I'm going to run through a few more examples of of supposed in some cases, in some more verified cases of people who've actually died quote unquote of laughter. But real quick, we should we should touch base on just just a reminder about laughter and physiology. We recently did an episode titled what did we call? That episode?

The healing power of laughter. That's what it was. Yes, So we we talked about how a good hearty laugh can help you out. It can heal you, it can it gets your your heart beating. It's a full body experience. I mean basically when we laugh, we have changes occurring and all different parts of the body, even the arms, the legs, obviously, the trunk, muscles. I mean we have to term bell you laugh for a reason because you're laughing so hard. You're just you're shaking like a bowl

full of jelly. Right. Respiratory system is up is upset um. In some cases you're actually crying um. You're you may be struggling for breath. Your face becomes moist and red. I mean you you you're having a full body episode. And if you did not know what laughter is, if you've grown up in a mystical land where there was no humor and you saw all somebody laughing, you might think it was some sort of a seizure. It's true. And actually the speaking of seizure, I mean just kind

of go over how it's working in your brain. Your brain's pre mort or cortical region is activated. And this is important because this is the part of the brain that stands up ready to react to sound. Then the left side of your cerebral cortex interprets the content and the structure of the piece of humor, and then the right side of the cortex performs the analysis, enabling you

to get the joke. And then an electrical wave pulses through your cerebral cortex about four tenths of a second later, and you laugh if the wave takes a negative charge. So already right there, you can see that there's a very complex set of motions going on in your brain

and your body. And if you were to tell me, hey, the government's working on a weapon that does just this list of things to the human body, I'd be like, WHOA, I'm not even sure if that's a non lethal weapon that sounds potentially dangerous and a little that might be outlawed by some sort of international convention, but it can

conceivably just be a real well told joke. And it's true because we know that laughing sometimes will lead to blacking out, and this is usually related to overbreathing, and it's usually not too dangerous, but there are times when you've got underlying conditions where it could actually become quite dangerous. Yes, and we'll we'll get into that in a minute. But first, people who have died or are said to have died by laughter. I'm not going to run through all of them.

You can easily find a list of these accounts online, but I'm gonna touch on a few of them here. One important one, at least in the lore of dying by laughter is Chrysippus. Chrystippus was amongst the most influential philosophers of the Hellenistic period, and it had a huge role on the development of stoicism, which is excellent because you used tend to think of a stoic individual is not necessarily being a person who's gonna engage in a lot of laughter, much less a lethal dosage of laughter,

right is. It turns out there are two different stories about it. How he died, and he died at the age of seventy three, and and that was in two two and six BC. Okay, that's a pretty advanced age at that time. Yeah, of course, you know he's living. He's like a philosopher. To be a specialized philosopher in any age, it kind of implies that maybe you have you know, not not to not philosophers, but you're not

gonna get crushed by a falling rock. Generally, you're not gonna be doing a lot of hard labors where you're Yeah. So anyway, one story is that Christmas just drank a lot of wine at a feast, grew dizzy and died. Okay, that's possible. But then there's another story that after an ass, you know, a donkey, had eaten up his figs, he cried out to an old woman, Now give the ass a drink of pure wine to wash down the figs, and then he laughed so heartily that he died. So um,

I just love that. From this period, it seems like people are getting their pets in the farm animals drunk a lot. Yes, you're thinking, of course of our friend, uh Tico, Yeah, well actually who was later on? It's still I kind of think that this is an absence of any parlor games. You go ahead and get the animal off the farm and start having it chugged something. Well,

it comes back to the duck, right. The whole reason they asked the question, what's the most hilarious animal to have doing human things and engaging in a human joke. The duck is certainly the funniest, but there are other funny creatures to how to do human things, and one of them is the donkey. A donkey doing anything non donkey is pretty hilarious. Likewise, the monkey, uh Like, it's interesting if you look, go to a museum. Go to a big museum next time, be on the lookout for

this particular motif, a monkey riding a horse. It's it's generated laughter since time out of mind, since we've actually ridden horses. Like, the idea that a monkey could do it is just somehow instantly hilarious. You can read into that way you will. Perhaps it's the the idea that

a monkey riding a horses is threatening. What if they ride they'll be like Planet of the Apes, right, Or maybe it's just the fact that we look down on the monkey as something less than us, and the idea that the monkey could do what we do is that laughter zone for us. Well, it's like whenever I want to make my daughter laugh, I'll just say like, hey, do you think that car ahead of us? Do you think that a cat's driving it? And then she'll start laughing outside But it's wearing a bow tie, and it's

just because of up to Annie even more. Yeah, yeah, the layers of ridiculousness, goats, cats, poppy, I mean, all fair game for for laughter by by far anyway. So Chrysippus, who knows there are two stories there. Certainly if he was seventy three, I could imagine it's possible that he died by laughter. It's you might have had, you know, again, an underlying heart condition. There another guy of note from the old world, well not as old world. We have

a man by the name of Martin of Aragon. Martin was the King of Aragon, Valencia, Sardinia, Corsica and Count of Barcelona from and king of Sicily from fourteen o nine, and he died in fourteen ten. Okay, so what happened here? The accounts say that he died due to a kind of a mixture of serious indigestion and laughter. Now he was only fifty six. And I think one possibility here is that I was reading a little bit about heart attacks.

And you do have this situation where someone someone has only, say, seen a heart attack on television. What do they think of They think of Fred Sandford having the big one, these Hollywood heart attacks. But in reality you can sometimes have a heart attack, experience a heart attack, and you might conceivably pass it off as innigestion because it's not this Hollywood Fred Sanford stumbling around the room kind of situation.

So it seems to me, and I'm no, you know, I'm not weighing in as an expert here, but it seems to me it's it's likely that he may have had a heart attack while laughing, and that's what killed. Are you wearing that lab coat and saying that at the same time, I totally believe you. That's why you need to look expert. Yeah, um, yeah, it's very very possible. And again this this is a sort of theme we see when we look at more modern cases of and

who know. Again, anytime you're looking at a two possible ways of person died, like ultimately, like, no one wants to die laughing, but you gotta admit it sounds like a good way to go. Like, if you got to go out some way in it's little stressful, it might as well be dying laughing. Yeah, there are many many other ways that I wouldn't want to go out. So you could see that where certainly centuries or millennia after someone has died, the story might get shifted into a

happy year. Oh he was a stoic, but he died laughing. It's just a great story, you know, which brings us to more modern times. There have been a few instances, but the most interesting one, the one that has been more closely studied certainly has become part of comedy lore, has to do with the older show called The Goodies, which I was not familiar with this. Were you familiar with the Goodies? No? But just the entire situation and what this person was laughing at I couldn't help yeah,

but be tickled by. I mean, it's unfortunate for the person who passed away from laughter at this. But we're talking about this good the Goodies, which is a TV show, and uh, we're talking about nineteen right, fifty year old brick player Alex Mitchell in England. He actually kicked the bucket while roaring with laughter at one of these shows Goodies.

And do you want to describe this? Oh the sketches, because okay, so The Goodies is basically three dudes, um one or more of them went to college with the guys in Monty Python, so they kind of shared a similar love of the absurd, and it's certainly absurd to watch. Again. I've never seen any of this and I don't have any nostalgia for it. So if you're a big fan of the goodies out there right in, I'd love to hear your take on it. But this particular sketch that

arguably killed Alex Mitchell was a kung Fu caper sketch. Uh. And this is a nineteen seventy five kung fu is big and everyone's excited about it and doing songs and whatnot. In this surreal sketch, you have a man from Lancashire battling via kung fu Scottish bagpipers. There's a man in black face as an American boxer. There's a mime like a French mine. There's an Australian with a boomerang. So it's like a battle like a kung Fu battle of

weird kind of distasteful stereotypes. I mean, well, isn't there there's putting involved? Right? This is I think the pudding is what I was like, what what is going on? The Lancashire mode of martial arts and this is called ikey thump and it involves palting opponents with black pudding. Okay, so the white stripes, which I can only assume there's some sort of correlation here. There's some sort of nutty

white stripes. Okay, So yeah, this guy is watching this. Yeah, and you know, unfortunately, after twenty five minutes of laughing, he actually, according to his wife, gave a tremendous belly laugh and then keeled over. Yes, um, yeah, what a way to go. And it wasn't just that he was laughing so very hard that he expired, you know, from a heart attack. It was actually that he had an unusual inheritable heart rhythm disorder called long QT syndrome. Yeah

Qt like the gas station, yes, quick trip. And this actually again keep showing up again and again that there's some sort of underlying heart condition. And I did want to mention the Danish audiologist. Have you heard about this guy? He died laughing in nine while watching a fish called Wanda. That now that I can I can get because there's some death and again the python element, I know, see

it is dangerous. Right. When the film was shown in theaters in Denmark, Ole Benson, the audiologist, laughed himself to death during this scene where Ken gets chips stuck up his nose or rather, um, I can't remember the Auto character, Yeah, Kevin Klein's character. I think it is Auto sticks French

fries also called chips right up his nose. So Benson is watching this, His heart rate went between two hundred and fifty five hundred beats per minute, and he eventually succumbed to cardiac arrest, and his family theorizes that the scene reminded him of a thing only dinner a few years earlier, when Old put a piece of cauliflower up his and everyone uh in his family's noses as a joke and made a bet with them on who could

eat up their carrots without cauliflower falling out. So they think that the scene with Ken and the chips really sort of insited this crazy laughter because he was remembering his own scene. Yeah, it's very sad, I gotta say, But Fish Called Wanted is a very very funny movie. Yeah, but in this case Mitchell QT syndrome. Cardiac arrests triggered by exertion, adrenaline, or a strong emotional response didn't always shut down the person entirely. Sometimes the heart resets itself

after five or six beats. But they figured that this was what was the heart of it when they diagnosed his daughter with it, and it's an hereditary condition. So the doctors at that point said, well, this, this is clearly the leading candidate for how this goody sketch did

him in. And you know, we were talking about it being a good way to die, as good as any of them are, and certainly his his wife, his his widow, she continues to have a rather positive viewing of this, Like she actually wrote the guys in the Goodies and said, hey, my, my, my husband. He was always a huge fan and he died laughing at your show. And you know this is before we became a very litigious society. I have to say this nineteen I don't know that if the same

thing would happen today. There's another person too that we have an example of this is the ice cream truck driver in Thailand. He actually died in his sleep, laughing, and his wife said that she tried to wake him up, but he kept laughing, and then autopsy suggested that he might have had a heart attack. So not only dying in your sleep, but you're dying while you're you know, presumably having a really funny dream. Yes, and then we also should mention laughter induced asthma. This is not really

a strong candidate for killing anyone. Laughter induced asthma. More than half of people with asthma report that their symptoms are brought on by laughter. This according to a two thousand five from n YU Medical Center in New York. Asthma that's triggered by laughter usually doesn't seem to cause serious asthma flare ups compared to other types of asthma. But the study did suggest that laughter induced asthma maybe a sign that your asthma isn't as well controlled as

it could be. So it's more of a more of a warning sign that you you need to adjust your management of your asthma than anything else. Before we get into pathological laughter, I want to mention one more thing that can contribute to not lethal laughter, but certainly an issue where laughter shuts down the body and interesting ways, and that is a cataplexy. This involves a sudden loss of voluntary muscle tone that may be triggered by strong emotions.

That's often a symptom of narcolepsy, which is a chronic disorder of the central nervous system characterized by the brains and ability to control your your sleep wake cycles. It can occur spontaneously, but is often triggered by against sudden strong emotions such as fear, anger, stress, excitement, or humor. So laughter is reportedly the most common cause of this.

And if this is ring any bells for anyone out there, there was an episode of This American Life a few years back about a neuroscientist by the name of Matt Frecking who suffers from cataplexy attacks when he's happy. So it was a real one of these really down er, somber episodes of This American Life because he's a happily married man but he has to limit his joy because his body shuts down when he experiences too much happiness in his life. That's just awful, it is. It's a

great episode. So look that one up. Just look up Matt threking F R E K I N G and This American Life and you'll find that episode. Well, I mean, you know, because we're all seeking joy and happiness all the time, right to think that you'd have to actually tamp that down. Yeah, it's like he's uh, you know, in a way, it's like enforced Buddhism in a kind of interested manner, you know about trying to steer yourself clear of extremes. But yeah, it's that's rough, all right. Um,

you had mentioned pathological laughter. Now, this, according to the Mayo Clinic, is laughter that can stem from a variety of neurological disorders, and it can make it extremely difficult, sometimes impossible for individuals to control their laughter, even if they see no humor in a situation. And in some cases, this pathological laughing can switch to pathological crying and the

person cannot do anything about it. And that's that's the thing about this is again there's the context maybe completely like you could be in a job interview and begin this pathological laughing or crying. It seems to occur most frequently among people with something called amniotrophic lateral sclerosis, and this is a disease of cerebral and spinal nerve cells.

And then almost half of these patients have these PLC symptoms, So they're not exactly sure what is the mechanism that is creating this sort of disorder, but uh, you know, they're looking more into it. Yeah, PLC pathological laughter and crying, and that the take come here is that it's a disturbance of feeling rather than a disturbance of emotions. So it's not that you know, so if you know anyone or encounter anyone that has this, it's not that they're

setting there thinking, oh my god, funerals are hilarious. No, it's this that like they're feeling the authentic emotions, are feeling what they should feel in the scenario, and what comes out that's where the disconnect happens. Now, there is this idea that, um, it could be a serotonin imbalance, and they think that because researchers have had some positive results with antidepressants like the selective serotonin re uptake inhibitors. So again they're still looking into this, but um, they

don't know a whole lot yet. In a lot of these conditions to it comes down to lesions and tumors that are disinhibiting laughter and crying centers of the brain. They're basically altering the neural network necessary for what we think of is normal responses situations. Yeah, I remember one article that you had sent me that it was about a two year old who had a lesion and at the time the mother didn't know it. She just like even the two year old was laughing hysterically out of context,

and they finally figured out. Now I believe they operated and the child was okay. But yeah, I can definitely disturb what seems to be your personality. Yeah, there's a really interesting YouTube video that I'll definitely embed on the blog post accompanying this website. The number of you may have seen, there's a Dutch interview and on the YouTube you can you can click a little tab that will actually bring up subtitles for it, so it's not just

people in another language, you know, doing a thing. But there was a dutchman by the name of hoog Boss and the whole thing is an interview with him and his wife, and the whole time he's laughing hysterically. Um, and this being the first time you see him, Like you you know, we've talked about how laughter is contagious, so you see this man just laughing his head off, and you're like, this guy's hilarious, he's fun. He's look at him. He's clutching like an Ernie doll at one point.

But his wife is sitting there the whole time just is done with She is over it. She has the most sour look on her face. And you're right at the beginning, you're like, oh, man, he's he's great, he's warm, he's funny. Why he's your husband, and he's laughing all the time, But so what? And then a couple of minutes into it, you realize how frustrating it must be

for her because he laughs all the time. His response to everything is laughter, except when he hears the national anthem and then yeah, when he hears Holland's national national anthem. But now this is what I don't think they actually

got to the absolute bottom of. But they suspect that this occurred because he had an operation and they think that the anesthesia may have altered, you know, neurologically the way that he his laughter response is coming in and because you know, his wife says, this didn't happen before the operation, and again it is it is hilarious to watch, but it's also kind of sad too, because he doesn't

really give a straight answer. You know, he talks, but you can't really tell if he's just trying to tamp down his own laughter or perhaps there's something else going on there right now. And again, this is a situation or someone who's laughing at at everything except in the national anthem. But there is an interesting study you came across, the Seinfeld study. An individual that is reacting with hysterical pathological laughter but only to a particular thing or a

particular a very narrow segment of comedy. Yeah, it's called the Seinfeld syncope. And it's basically a fainting episode through laughter. And it was called the Seinfeld sincope because there have been a couple of instances where people were watching Seinfeld and know only Seinfeld and laughing to such a degree that they began to faint. But what is going on here is that the show is actually revealing that there's

a potentially serious problem in the person. The one guy who was sixty two years old, he had a history of hypertension, hyper cholesterol, lemmia, he had a coronary bypass, and he was a smoker, and although he received enough blood to the brain when he was calm, when he laughed hysterically, he experienced a normal physiological phenomenon called the

Valsalva maneuver. Now, when this happens, you get forced expiration against a closed airway, resulting in increased pressure in the chest that affects the heart output inside, like the yoga breath where you like, uh, school breath. Is that we're talking about um breath of fire? Yeah, maybe in a way that I don't know if it's the exact same thing. But in the other yes, is the kin to it

and that is causing this pressure. And because he had blocked arteries coming off of the Aorita, this Valsavia maneuver reduced the blifflow to his brain in and caused him to faint. Now what he was watching specifically was the character of George Costanza, by the way, Yeah, I found that that. I mean, that was what was so interesting that it was. It was not just only Seinfeldt, but it was like one character on Seinfeldt that was really

causing this for him. And I could see if it was the Marine Biologist episode, because I really like that boy. Well he was pretending to be a marine and then the whale washed up. You know, always fun to see George unmasked. But I don't know who knows which one it was. But again, not so much that Seinfeld un Seinfeld was funny, but but not so much that there was something about seinfeld that was that was impacting people's health, but the individuals had something askew in their own physiology

that made them susceptible to this attack. And just real quick, it's worth noting that you also see things like Angelman syndrome Tourette syndrome. Both of these carried laughters of symptom. You often see patholytical laughter occurring as a symptom. So it's not, oh, well, that person's laughs all the time. It's no, that person laughs all the time. Let's get to the bottom of it. So Tourette syndrome is a neurobiological disorder that causes the combination of ticks and involuntary

vocal outbursts. This is we could do a whole podcast on Tourette's. But this is one that is often misrepresented to a large extent, and this is certainly in comedy. It's people come back to and use it as a as part of a comedy act, which is someone shouting obscenities. But that's a rather simplistic look at what that condition actually is. And then Angelman syndrome is a rare chromosome,

a disorder that affects the nervous system. So people with this condition usually can't speak and display a quote happy, excitable demeanor with frequent smiling and laughter. M okay, So there you have it, death by laughter, the possibility of

death by laughter. I guess the will take home here is that you probably could not craft a joke so funny that it would You would have difficulty even crafting a joke to target a particular individual, like an assassin's bullet of a joke, like if you wanted to take out us fitting head of state and you put a lot of research and all right, what do they find funny? What's there? What's their heart condition? Like? What you know?

How healthy are they? If you put that much work in it, you could perhaps incapacitate them a little bit, maybe, but it would be very difficult to actually craft the killing joke. Yeah, it would be very very hard. Now do you remember in the Monty Python's get about the World's myth dangerous joke, the killing joke, what the Germans tried to craft In response, No, I don't, and they over the radio there were sweet peanuts fucking down Distrasse

and Vaughan Vos assaulted peanut. It is really funny, it's a pretty good, like it's funny watching the reaction that people who are listening to it over the radio because they're just they're just their faces are blank. And but it is absurd. Is that sketches. It really does drive home the how the absurdity like humor is one of those things that doesn't necessarily cross to other languages all that well. I often feel like British humor I totally get.

I share the language with it. If I turn on the Spanish TV network and I happened to catch some of that. Sometimes I'll see some of the slapstick and it's making sense. But then I seem to have like a real disconnect with Japanese humor, Like I love a lot of media that comes this way from Japan, but but when I encounter humor it often I often feel like, wow, this is not speaking to me, Like my I don't have the right cultural wavelengths set. What about do you

think there's a French humor? Oh yeah, yeah, okay, tell me tell me about what you think the French humor is. Well, I mean the stereotype, of course, is the French love Jerry Lewis. Yeah, but that's an American I mean certainly have like the roots of of mime and uh, and you have puppetry is of course big street puppetry. To see some it's not punching Judy in France, they have another name. But I have seen some some French puppetry in that vein and it's it's hilarious. But I don't know.

I think if we look close enough, we'd find that even French humor is more diverse than we think. You know, oh, I'm sure, I'm sure. I'm just thinking that's not really known as as a big export for France, so just just curious. I tend to think the French this is just a huge generation. I think they like grotesque looking men doing ridiculous things, but I think that probably the same for most cultures. Yeah, all right, Well that's the episode we'd love to hear from you guys and gals

out there. If you have any personal experience with with deadly laughter or with any of these conditions that we've mentioned here, we'd really love to hear some insider insight on that and what it's like to live with it, or if you just have thoughts in general about laughter. Responding to this episode or our previous episode about the healing power of laughter. We've kind of given you the

the yen and the yang here looking at laughter. Is this this physiological um mental event that in the right or wrong situations, can go either way? So reach out to us. You can find us on Facebook, where we are Stuff to Blow Your Mind. We're also stuff to Blow your Mind on Tumblr, and you can follow us on Twitter under the handle blow the Mind. And you can also drop us a line at blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands

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