There was no funnier sight gag in early cinema than the catastrophe of epidemic contagion. In The Yawner (1907), a man’s involuntary yawning transmits irresistibly to his housekeeper, a squadron of soldiers, day drinkers at a café, a police officer, and an inanimate portrait of a woman, who is roused from her stasis by the impulse to yawn. Habitual tics such as yawning, laughing, sneezing, hiccupping, itching, coughing, barking, sobbing, and blinking spread like wildfire when too many nervous bodies find themselves together in close quarters. In Laughing Gas (1907), after her dentist gives her nitrous oxide (laughing gas) during a tooth extraction, a black woman’s joyful hysterics spread to the white workers, black gospel singers, and several police officers around her. In The Epidemic (1914), the craze for tango dancing possesses bodies eager for fun, while That Fatal Sneeze (1907) takes the perils of involuntary outbursts to their mortal conclusion (a man dies from sneezing!). From a sneeze to a belly laugh and the penchant for tango dancing, any such bodily symptom was easy fodder for an epidemic film.

Should we find it disturbing that these movies were all comedies? What is so funny about the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of individuals succumbing to the spastic will of the roiling masses? Zombie movies and other grossly corporeal films evoke anxious dread and clammy discomfort, and a little haphazard excess can tip the balance between horror and comedy. So where is the line between anxiety and enjoyment when it comes to hysterical bodily contagion?

Laughter is often described in suspiciously hysterical terms. The euphemism first took hold in the late 19th century, when the notion of hysterical laughter shifted in meaning from nervous breakdown to convulsive enjoyment. Prior to that time, “hysterical laughter” was the last thing you ever wanted to experience with your body. It rang out, from the anguished pleas of psychiatric asylums to incidents of mass psychogenic illness, as in the 1787 Cotton Mill Outbreak and 1962 Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. Neither entirely real nor purely illusion, hysteria lingers in the gray zone between anxiety and transmission. This, no doubt, is what makes it ripe terrain for comedy.

Mimicry is the cornerstone of comic pantomime, just as it is essential to the symptomology of hysteria. Hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus, or womb (hystera), and physicians believed that a woman’s womb could start wandering around her body in cases of dormancy or disuse. This perilous affliction of spinsters and widows was thought to make mischief in the body by imitating the organic processes of the zones it traversed. For example, if the womb got into the throat, it might create a sensation of choking (“globus hystericus”). If it made its way down into the foot, it could trigger paralysis or dancing mania, spreading contagiously as in the 1518 Dancing Plague or the 1374 Dancing Mania that shadowed the Black Death. Incidentally, tango and polka dancing were the most frequent hazards of slapstick contagion comedies (see Kristina Köhler’s extensive research on this topic). Whether comic or tragic, the notion of hysteria has long conveyed a severe confusion between mimicry and organic affliction. Is the patient truly suffering, or merely a malingerer? Amid mass outbreaks of epidemic disease, hysteria’s hallmark, and indeed its prime suspect, is imitation.

Affective Contagion in Early Film Comedy

In the early 20th century, the mass migration of people and the rapid swarming of laboring bodies into fast-paced capitalist cities laid the groundwork for a visual explosion of epidemic-themed comedies. There is something uniquely therapeutic about the absurd spectacle of bodily contagion when it is enjoyed from a distance. Cayenne Pepper in a Street Cab(1903) lampoons the nervous sneezing fit that breaks out when a lady with her arms full of grocery packages accidentally drops her package of cayenne pepper on an overcrowded streetcar. The result, as the Selig Polyscope Company put it, is an “epidemic of sneezing among the passengers, which is more easily imagined than described.”

But affective suggestion also served as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and xenophobic attitudes. Gustave Le Bon, in his 1895 study of crowd psychology, compared the contagion of ideas, sentiments, and emotions to “microbes.” Gut feelings gain momentum in the crucible of modern crowds, where unschooled passions are given free rein over elitist expertise. Early films depict the hazards of mob psychology in purely somatic terms. A Contagious Nervousness (1908) burlesques an explosion of anger that germinates from a husband and wife’s squabble and quickly spreads, first to workers and eventually to barnyard animals. Other epidemic-themed comedies hilariously mistake the contagion for the cause. An All-Wool Garment (1908) plays on underwear and its effects: as a man is tormented by his itchy new garments, his co-workers, streetcar passengers, and even fellow movie spectators cannot resist the urge to scratch. The confusion between itch and contagion reaches its peak, and the crisis is resolved when the man buys new cotton underwear. Never mind the masses of prickling bodies who had never donned itchy garments in the first place. Their compulsion to relieve themselves is collateral damage from the desire to imagine dangerous affective contagion in amusingly epidemic terms.

Neurasthenia and hysteria were often treated as catchalls for any unexplainable ailment; in other words, if you couldn’t make an accurate diagnosis, you simply called it hysteria. Potential symptoms ranged from somnambulism, loss of sensation, and hallucinations to political excitement, novel reading, and “masturbation and tobacco.” Mysterious in origin, overdetermined in meaning (from deviant desire to overt defiance), and unpredictable in transmission, the amorphous morphology of hysteria rendered the disease both fascinating and horrifying. Endemic ambivalence about epidemic hysteria was not lost on early filmmakers of slapstick comedy, who kept film’s popularity going despite rampant anxieties about its toxic immorality.

How to prove that nervous contagion is innocuous? Look at the funny side! Theater owners advised turning up the houselights, noting that viewers could then see their neighbors’ writhing, spasmodic bodies and would “no longer keep laughs exclusively to themselves.” Similarly, according to The Film Index , a man’s nervous disorder afflicts “all within sight” in Contagious Nervous Twitching (1908). His involuntary tic has roughly the same effect as a woman’s fetching physique in A Very Fine Lady (1908), where her presence provokes men’s libidinous ogling and brings their work to a halt. The nervous twitcher, by contrast, wreaks havoc through bodily contagion. A janitor’s knee starts to twirl and he tumbles down the stairs; a construction worker atop a ladder is seized by spastic convulsions and plasters a supervising architect in mortar; a wedding party turns into a hysterical orgy; and so forth. In The Yawner, affective suggestion animates even the inanimate, turning a concrete statue into a neurasthenic tableau vivant. Do germs reside in our living bodies or in the spaces we inhabit? Whether corporeal or environmental, the man’s nervous tic sends everyone around him to his neurologist’s office by the end of the film.

Archiving “Epidemics”: Fatal Germ or Financial Gimmick?

There was no greater selling point for a slapstick film comedy than comparing its laughing effects to those of an epidemic. Viewers flocked to watch amusing contagion gags that promised to incite uncontrollable audience laughter. For example, according to The Nickelodeon, A Flirty Affliction (1910), a gender-reversed remake of Contagious Nervous Twitching, in which a young woman’s facial spasms are mistaken for sexual flirting, was guaranteed to set off a convulsive epidemic in the audience. The Moving Picture World promised that the Vitagraph comedy Grin and Win (1909), about a “sour-faced family” who buys a Billiken that turns them into a family radiating happiness, would make audiences laugh heartily. “The spirit of the thing is contagious and before the audience knows it everyone is laughing.” Likewise, in Matrimonial Epidemic (1911), a slapstick comedy about an epidemic of matrimony, “the love germ finds lodgment and develops to laughable proportions.” Last but not least, The San Francisco Dramatic Review described Seven Days (1910) as a “raging epidemic of fun, laughter, merriment, and all other jolly complications.” Affective contagion offered a lucrative gimmick for voracious film advertisers, and pandemic-themed sight gags were their ace in the hole.

Though clearly the ploy of an expanding capitalist industry, these hyperbolic metaphors collided headlong with tangible outbreaks of deadly disease. Even before the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, recurring waves of illness threatened the livelihood of filmmakers and movie theaters. Polio bedeviled the industry from 1912 until long after the 1918 flu outbreak. Children under 16 were banned from going to the movies. Variety wrote in 1912 that “the infantile epidemic has done a great injury to show business,” as the police had issued an order preventing children under 15 from attending local theaters. Partial closures, age-based prohibitions, and other safety precautions were implemented across the United States. In 1917, The Moving Picture Weekly described polio as “one of the most serious menaces which has ever faced the moving picture exhibitors,” lamenting the steep decline in daily box-office receipts caused by the loss of young audiences. In summer 1918, it was again polio, not influenza, that forced movie theaters across the country, from New York to Iowa to California, to close for more than a month.

Perhaps it was the partial quarantines prompted by polio’s slow spread that led exhibitors to remain somewhat cavalier in the face of influenza. In December 1918, The Springfield News-Record published a scandalous editorial titled “Common Sense and the ‘Flu’,” declaring that “patience has ceased to be a virtue” and describing mandatory closures as “ridiculous.” Portentous symptoms were debated not for their contagion but for their unpredictable timing. “How is a theatre manager to know whether a patron has a cough by looking him in the eye?” lamented one nervous employee, adding, “How can he tell whether or not the ticket holder will sneeze while he is in the place?” As we remember from Cayenne Pepper in a Street Cab, the urge to sneeze can be set off by anything from nervous suggestion to edible spices.

In the early 20th century, diseases such as typhus, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, measles, and rubella loomed large as mortal threats to public health and to individuals, who might contract them in any communal space, from the streetcar to the marketplace to the movie theater. The rise in 1905 of seedy, storefront “nickelodeon” theaters, where spectators were packed like sardines into unventilated rooms, raised public health concerns about sanitation. Scarlet fever closed a swath of movie theaters in Chicago in 1906, in New York in 1907, in Ohio in 1910, and in Omaha in 1917, though an alliance of theater owners won an appeal against regional commissioners to keep the theaters open. Then as now, economic incentives butted heads with public health precautions.

The unresolved tensions between ticket sales and infected audiences also shaped the rhetoric of the film press, which launched a fervent propaganda campaign to trivialize deadly epidemics in order to ward off the financial threats facing the film industry. The movie industry actively weaponized the terminology of epidemics, using the term contagion specifically as an incitement to fun, laughter, happiness, and amusement. During the 1911 typhoid epidemic, for example, which kept customers away from movie theaters, a leading film distribution company widely ran the following ad: “CREATES AN EPIDEMIC OF ENTHUSIASM WHEREVER SHOWN.”

In 1918, amid quarantines and nationwide closures, Variety wrote: “Happiness is the most contagious thing in the world, a thousand times more so than the flu.” Variety was, without a doubt, an extreme case. Contagious happiness battled dangerous diseases in a zero-sum game that pitted affective capitalism against killjoy health regulations. Photoplay gave pride of place to these words from a reader’s letter: “I hope the health authorities, in their efforts to protect public health in movie theaters, won’t forbid us to laugh at Charlie Chaplin on the grounds that fun is contagious.” As Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno so aptly remind us, “Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.” But a Frankfurt School Marxist would frown on this specious comparison between contagious flu and salutary laughter.

Off the screen, Seven Days , a 1910 stage comedy, was praised as “a quarantine comedy through and through. Quarantines come with epidemics, and Seven Days is a raging epidemic of fun, laughter, merriment, and all other jolly complications.” Similarly, in 1917 Harold Lloyd’s Lonesome Luke character set off “an epidemic of laughter,” and Motion Picture News wrote that The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin (1918) produced “a contagious state of mind.” “‘A whole German army couldn’t have handled that crowd,” said one observer. To invoke Le Bon (a French social psychologist) in the context of patriotism and xenophobia, the germs of a suggestible psychic complex were the entertainment industry’s swift response to threats of disruption, from world war to public health disasters.

Women’s laughs and smiles were especially marketable; Helen Duval’s “hearty, contagious and irresistible” laugh, for example, propped up an otherwise lame vaudeville routine that Variety would later compare to “chop suey.” From the female throat to convulsing bodies: Motion Picture News called Vivian Martin’s smiles in Mirandy Smiles (1918) “as contagious as the flu.” Vivian’s “emotional qualities,” which blended sentiment with comedy, contributed greatly to a film that promised a cheerful escape from “gloomy war pictures.”

In this collage of quotations, which I have gathered from the years 1903-1919, film industry discourse described the following phenomena as “epidemics”:

Censorship, white slave films, moving stage productions, labor unionization, reformist boycotts, midnight revues, rowdyism, freak legislative provisions, Charlie Chaplin comedies, depictions of gun violence, Theda Bara-ism (after the silent film actress), groundbreaking technology patents, movie stars buying expensive cars, films dramatizing fatal heart disease, the proliferation of “star-owned companies,” bad photoplays, rising admission prices, the rise of feature-length films, troublesome state film rights, unwholesome films, and, of course, film itself (that is, the passion for cinema).

Although deadly epidemics, from typhoid to scarlet fever and from polio to influenza, were everywhere among moviegoers in these years, the happiness virus always got the better of the epidemic virus. Or, as a pseudonymous Shadowland writer put it in 1919: “Since everything is contagious, laughter, good nature and cheer as much as diseases, permit me, dear audience, to remain your obedient servant. O.B. Joyful.”

Epidemic Affect and Bodily Contagion in the Time of COVID-19

“Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone”—except during quarantine. At a time when our sociality is so thoroughly mediated by screens, what do we expect from our images? Depending on recurring outbreaks and regional authorities, Zoom meetings, virtual cinema, and online happy hours will hold sway for the foreseeable future. If COVID-19 were transmitted through the screen, as in a Medusa-style horror film like The Ring or Bird Box or Videodrome , where the copy itself becomes a source of the virus, perhaps it could rescue us from apocalyptic Zoom misery. On the other hand, nothing is lonelier than watching live comedy shows in which canned audience merriment is added to pre-packaged monologues pulled out of the freezer in an empty studio, as in programs like Last Week Tonight and Saturday Night Live (for now renamed Saturday Night Live at Home). With apologies to the famous Marxist critique, when we are too alienated or too exhausted to laugh by ourselves, not even the laugh track will laugh for us anymore.

As laughter takes on a traumatic affective urgency as a way to shake off the morbidly anxious zeitgeist, this laughing fit is only a drop in the bucket in the age of COVID-19. “Audiences are affected—and infected—by the laughter of others,” we read in Julian Hanich, The Audience Effect. Yet laughter’s key feature, its collective contagiousness through physical proximity, disappears during social distancing. For audiences now quarantined at home, it is perhaps horror or the thriller, rather than comedy, that takes on real therapeutic value. Steven Soderbergh’s brilliant Contagion (2011), for example, jumped from 270th to second place on the list of the most popular films in the Warner Bros. catalog in March 2020. Along with the Ebola film Outbreak (1995), the South Korean sci-fi drama Flu (2013), and the bird-flu TV series Pandemic (2007), Contagion offers anxious viewers both a release of dramatic tension and the speculative comfort that, if we can imagine it, at least it will not happen on a catastrophic scale (by the end of Contagion, some 70 million people have died).

Still, the film’s spectacle of bodily contagion powerfully soothes viewers’ frayed and isolated nerves. As Sarah Keller’s Anxious Cinephilia puts it, “The variable nature of cinema naturally gives rise to variable relationships with cinema.” Films are most therapeutic when their ambivalent conflicts viscerally coincide with our own. Call it contagion or perhaps anxious identification, it is certainly not an epidemic. “Social feeling […] is shared feeling,” writes Sara Ahmed, and therefore contagious. That is precisely what makes affect so dangerous. There was no shortage of “shared feeling” among the “LIBERATE” protesters who defied the quarantine and gathered with Confederate flags and rifles to demand that the state reopen businesses. By contrast, in Lachen in der U-Bahn (2011), a woman’s amused antics in a packed car on a German subway spread merrily among the other passengers like an epidemic.

So where is the line between anxiety and pleasure when it comes to the spectacle of hysterical bodily contagion? Personally, I adore the sight gag of tumbling, stomping bodies in excessive proximity, of convulsive yawners, sneezers, twitchers, tango dancers, and old-time laughers. Whether these unruly masses will go down in the record as anxious dread or as cathartic comedy is a question for the collective political stage, one that goes beyond the analytics of social affect. Revolutionary affect should not be contagious like a germ, but creative and provocative like a carnivalesque general strike.

This piece was written in March-April 2020, before the global political uprisings against white supremacy, police brutality, and structural racism that erupted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. I see the recent protests, which have radiated political anger and resilient spontaneity, as a “carnivalesque general strike” that parlays affective contagion into collective solidarity.

Maggie Hennefeld

Translation: Murat Müftüoğlu

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