KOLHAPUR, India—Eight thousand miles from home, hired for a job far beyond my experience level, encircled by hysterical, chortling throngs with whom I could not speak, I knew that the important thing was to maintain the proper expression. A 20-something Texan, plunked down on a hillside in rural India at dawn, fumbling with the video camera I was hired to operate, I tried to feign a certain bemused nonchalance as the Tramboli Laughter Yoga Club of Kolhapur cavorted about me, performing its daily exercises. By the end of that first morning of shooting, my face had set and hardened into the grin it would maintain for the vast majority of the coming weeks, a grin warm, distant, and encouraging, a grin that tried not to betray my suspicion that all the Laughter Club members were, in some fundamental way, absolutely out of their minds. But as we filmed Laughter Club the evidence of their insanity kept accumulating:

• We captured Madan Kataria, the laughter guru of the world, as he was greeted at the train station like a triumphant, returning king, paraded around by his acolytes, women touching his shoes and covering him with flowers, men blow-ing horns, chanting his edicts, feeding him fruits, nuts, and other unidentifiable treats with their own hands.

• We met Arvind Shah, a grave and angry laughter autocrat, ordering the uniformed throngs of his Laughter Club to stand in formation and laugh precisely on command.

• We followed a political maelstrom of near-Shakespearean proportions, set off when laughter rebel Dilip Shah attempted to skew the ascendant laughter movement to his own vision, establishing a massive event, a world laughter competition.

• Everywhere we went, in every park, in every town, every morning, we found hordes of laughers hopping, tickling, and dancing with a joyful abandon I had to envy.

Just as the laughers of India baffled and intrigued me, so did I seem to baffle and in-trigue them. Presumably because I was head and shoulders taller than any local, they dubbed me “Titanic” (a nickname my friends in America find hilarious, given that even playing Wiffle ball leaves my arms sore for days). As Titanic, I seemed to garner an odd, wholly unearned celebrity around town. Titanic’s movements and background were fodder for local newspaper and TV. When Titanic came to parties, guests asked for his autograph. When Titanic walked down the sidewalk, parents made him pose for photographs with their children. After it became known that Titanic lived in New York, men everywhere would put their hands on his shoulders as they sadly, knowingly said, “Twin Towers.” When Titanic spoke of the price of curry in America, boys invited friends over to hear, afraid their reports of the conversation wouldn’t be believed. But what most perplexed, even vexed the laughers of India was Titanic’s unwillingness ever to stop filming, his constant darting around, with the director, in search of a better shot, as their subjects laughed and pranced about them.

“Do they ever stop with the cameras?” one of Kataria’s disciples once asked his guru. “They’re American,” Kataria shrugged. “It’s a work culture.”

“Why don’t you relax?” the man asked, approaching. With both of my hands supporting my camera, I couldn’t deflect his fingers as he forced some globular confection into my mouth. “Enjoy snack. Laugh a little.” The truest cultural barrier between us had become obvious: not one of taste or language or experience, but a deep belief in one another’s absurdity.

One evening, after many weeks of filming, Arvind Shah, the Laughter Club czar, took us up into the cool, grassy hills above Kolhapur. He and some members of his club had bought land there years before, with plans to fulfill a now moribund vision of Kataria’s: the creation of a compound called Laughter City, a kind of ashram for the silly, far from the clutch-es of the curmudgeons of the world below. But due to drainage issues, inaccessibility, and financial limitations, the land proved nearly impossible to develop. That didn’t stop Shah from taking us to the summit, where, even in his mid-70s, he remained certain he would live to see his utopia rise. Along with several of the prominent citizens of Kolhapur whom he’d brought with him, Shah then treated us to a demonstration of daily life in his imagined city.