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Episode 364-"Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema" with author Maggie Hennefeld
Published 7 months, 3 weeks ago
Description
In this episode I spoke with author Maggie Hennefeld about her latest book "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema". Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate―or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy?