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Jun 10, 2023

How Laughing Gas Created America’s First Comedy Boom

In 1844, 45 years after Davy’s initial experiments, a dentist named Horace Wells

In 1844, 45 years after Davy's initial experiments, a dentist named Horace Wells attended a laughing gas show hosted by Gardner Colton, where attendees were charged 25 cents a huff. As usual, things degenerated rapidly, with a local teenager inhaling like a quarter of his body weight in gas and sprinting uncontrollably into a wooden bench. While the audience whooped with laughter, Wells noticed that the youth seemed to feel no pain, despite bleeding heavily from both knees. This observation caused Wells to wonder if nitrous oxide could be used to dull pain during medical operations. (A breakthrough that may have been helped by the fact that Wells was also incredibly high at the time.)

After learning to produce nitrous oxide from Colton, Wells successfully used it as an anesthetic on several of his dental patients. Unfortunately, when he tried to demonstrate this to a panel of distinguished medical colleagues, Wells nervously took the gas bladder away too early. The patient was soon moaning and writhing in pain as a result, while Wells hacked away at his mouth with the finest tools available to 19th-century dentistry. (We’re assuming a Bowie knife and a big wooden mallet.) The observers declared the experiment a miserable failure, and laughing gas was discredited as an anesthetic, with one doctor declaring that pain relief was a ludicrous dream that "we can no longer pursue in our times."

Wells dealt with this career setback by going completely insane, becoming addicted to sniffing chloroform and being arrested for throwing acid at a group of local sex workers. He eventually died by suicide in prison, but his work continued to interest one of his former students, a shady dentist and con artist named W.T.G. Morton, who quietly kept conducting Wells’ experiments. With nitrous discredited, Morton turned to ether, which was then a recreational drug popular with groups of teenagers known as "ether sniffers." After huffing on an ether-soaked handkerchief, Morton became convinced that it could be used as a surgical painkiller and successfully demonstrated this at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846.

Ether was soon being used in surgeries worldwide, despite the best efforts of Morton, who was trying to keep the identity of the first anesthetic secret to profit from a patent he had fraudulently obtained on the long-discovered chemical. With ether leading the way, doctors quickly rediscovered Wells’ work and began using nitrous oxide for its pain-numbing properties. Meanwhile, the laughing gas craze began to die out as Americans discovered new and more racist forms of comedy, like minstrel shows, which were developed in the 1840s. Before long, nitrous could no longer sell out theaters and was reduced to a sideshow attraction in traveling carnivals, which charged a few cents for a huff on the laughter hose.

But for a time there, laughing gas was an integral part of American culture. And hey, we stage revivals of 19th-century plays all the time. There are even charities dedicated to preserving vanished art forms like vaudeville. So perhaps it's time to truly celebrate our shared heritage by packing into a theater and getting turnt on poorly made NOS. You can't tell us that's a worse evening than Dear Evan Hansen.