Steven Millhauser incorporates horror into the fantastic in his stories. The point of view in this story is in the first person, which makes the readers feel like they are in this situation as well with the narrator and the town. “Dangerous Laughter,” the adolescents in the town becomes obsessed with laughter. The story begins with a town that, at first, has small pockets of laughter. This soon begins to snowball “as laugh parties gave way to laugh parlors, and rumors thickened, we sometimes had the sense that our secret games had begun to spread to other regions of the town.”
This is just the first step to the escalation from innocent fun to dangerous horror. There is a member of a “laugh parlor” who is tickled to the “point of delirium.” After these parlors went into effect, there is a woman who the members love as she has a unique laugh. It begins to affect her health:
“I noticed that her strenuous new life was beginning to affect her appearance. Now when she came to us her hair fell across her cheeks in long strands, which she would impatiently flick away with the backs of her fingers. She looked thinner, though it was hard to tell; she looked tired; she looked as if she might be coming down with something. Her eyes, no longer hidden under lowered lids, gazed at us restlessly and a little vaguely. Sometimes she gave the impression that she was searching for something she could no longer remember.”
They do not seem to care, though, as they only want the laughter. This idea of laughter is affecting the town, society, and the health of the characters. After laughing begins to die out, crying is the next big thing. The problem with the addiction to crying is that there was nothing learned from the previous addiction. Nothing had changed, which is a possible point of the story. The town knows what happened when they became addicted to laughing, yet they plunged into the new trend of crying.
“A passion for weeping seized us. It proved fairly easy for one girl to set off another, who set off a third. Boys, tense and embarrassed, gave way slowly. We held weep-fests that left us shaken and thrilled. Here and there a few laugh parties and laugh clubs continued to meet, but we knew it was the end of an era.”
The horror aspect of this story is not blaring as you read; it is in the small details throughout the story. The details progress so casually, the reader accepts them and does not question the events that unfold then later questions them. “What drew us wasn’t so much the hidden absurdity of words, which we’d always suspected, as the sharp heaves and gasps of laughter itself.”