Two Repressed Egotists

I know how very wrong it is to find other people's disabilities in any way amusing, but reading this article in yesterday's Guardian, I just couldn't help myself.

The article concerns a 20 year-old woman called Kay who, like 20,000 people in the UK, suffers from a form of narcolepsy called cataplexy. Unfortunately for Kay, she collapses every time she laughs or finds something funny.

"Sometimes I only have to think about something funny to collapse - and sometimes it happens again just as I'm coming round because I think about the joke that made me fall over in the first place," she says. "Once I tried to calculate how often it happened in one day, but I lost count at 40."

I don't know about you, but that sounds hellish - like one of those terrible paradoxical punishments handed out to wicked Greek Gods in the myths we read at school. Frankly, collapsing because you started to laugh is pretty funny - so if, like Kay, you suffer from cataplexy, anything even remotely amusing is liable to start off a chain reaction of hysterical laughter followed by painful physical collapse.

Obviously the best thing for her to do would be to spend all day watching Jim Davidson do stand up.

That (horribly easy) joke aside, the article really comes in to its own when describing the other forms that cataplexy can take:

"Laughter is the most common trigger but some people have cataplexic attacks when they feel other strong emotions - anger, excitement, embarrassment, fear, or surprise, for example. There are even people who collapse when they think about sex or say, "I love you." "I had one patient who it happened to whenever he felt smug," says Dr Andrew Hall".

So here's a challenge to all genetic scientists out there - do whatever you can to locate the cataplexy gene (if such a thing exists), and then work out a way by which we could switch it on or off in people. In an ideal world, all our politicians would suffer from a form of cataplexy which would cause them to collapse in violent pain every time they contemplated telling a lie.

And that would surely be a disability worth laughing at.