Curtain calls

In 1999, a joke told in a Seattle bar triggered a 13-hour spasm of laughter in a 35-year-old man. Doctors could not stop the laughter. It ended only when the man suffered heart failure and died. Asked before he died what was so funny, the man reportedly gasped between guffaws: “There was something about an antelope. And shellfish. I remember a part about shellfish.”

LaFee is a health science writer at UC San Diego.