No Laughing Matter

Laughter may be the best medicine for many people. For one German, however, it is a reason to complain. The 52-year-old Berlin man made an official complaint about a female neighbour's laugh which resulted in police involvement last December. The 47-year-old woman, identified only as Barbara M., invited co-workers from her architectural firm to her apartment in the Moabit district of Berlin. "It was a working dinner and, after things got going, there was a good deal of laughter," she told the court. Next thing she knew, police officers banged on the door at 22:30, saying her downstairs neighbour had complained about "four hours of sustained, raucous laughter".

Unemployed Bernd F., who lives with his mother, had pointed out that it is against the law in Germany to make too much noise after 10 p.m. To top it off, Barbara subsequently received a formal complaint from district authorities demanding she pay a €25 fine for "loud laughter between 18:00 and 22:30".

But she got the last laugh when she took the matter to court, where a judge threw out the fine, calling it "laughable", according to a report in the Berliner Kurier newspaper. "The sound of human laughter and, for that matter human crying, is a generally accepted part of life," the judge said.