“God has given me laughter. Everyone who hears about it will laugh with me.” Sarah (Genesis 21:6)

Laughter has got to be one of the strangest phenomena in the human response system. Why do humans laugh? “It’s rarely because something’s funny,” say Peter McGraw and Joel Warner of Slate Magazine.[1]The two describe an example of the vexing phenomenon of “laughing disease” in Tanzania, in which schoolgirls in a strict boarding school couldn’t stop laughing. The “disease” spread so virulently that the school had to shut down for 16 days. When the “epidemic” slowed months later, a thousand people had been afflicted by an obsessive laughter the locals called “omuneepo.”[2] Scientists later suspected that the laughter began as an unconscious, unplanned protest response to the strict and harsh co…