Fun abounds when fictional characters fall ill

My secret love can go secret no longer. My silence cannot — must not — be maintained.

Nothing makes me giddier than when a fictional character gets sick.

I'm not talking about those melodramas with tearjerker tales or stories where a gravely ill character gathers their loved ones around them and everyone — including me, usually, but I cried when it looked like they were going to lose the little girl in "Three Men and a Baby" — is bawling their eyes out.

No, I'm talking about when a character, usually based in a sitcom or some other comedic surrounding, succumbs to the sniffles.

Such a deceptively simple premise is usually able to be mined for pure comedic gold, and the results are often akin to the stars aligning and everything on earth equaling perfection.

In other words, when a character catches cold, it means there's a little bit more happiness in the universe because somewhere, something is occurring as it is supposed to be.

Take the hilarious occurring when Dr. Frasier Crane comes down with a cold on an old episode of his eponymous sitcom, "Frasier." The radio shrink annoys family members with his whining, becomes paranoid that brother Niles is going to steal his job and eventually gets so doped up on medication that he storms the radio station where he works, and takes to hanging up on callers seeking his advice because he finds their problems boring.

Or in that underrated comic strip, "Fox Trot," a few years back when, one week, the three children in the Fox family get sick one right after another, mostly due to the kids hanging out in the first sick kid's room in hopes of missing school. The next week, mom Andy is talking on the phone to a friend about how horrible the weekend was.

"I thought it couldn't get any worse," she said. "Then came Monday."

Cut to Andy's husband, Roger, not really the patron saint of mental health on a good day, still clad in his bathrobe and looking miserable. But not as miserable as Andy will be. More hilarity ensues.

Last example, although I'm sure by now you concede my point: The Tick. Nigh-invulnerable (that means super heroically indestructible for the uninitiated), even the big blue do-gooder of justice is felled in the episode of the classic cartoon series entitled, "The Tick versus The Common Cold." He blows his nose, watches daytime wrestling, struggles to get his sidekick, Arthur, to hand over a bowl of soup and combats an evil alien in the apartment next door, while his nose remains plugged all the while.

What is it about watching these germ-riddled situations unspool that I find so ticklish? Many of these characters are probably known for more grandiose situations and dilemmas, things that while we may find them hilarious, are very unlikely to actually occur.

But everyone comes down with a cold or flu at some point. Unless they claim they don't, in which case we must work feverishly to show them what they've been missing out on.

In reality, it's not much fun. You might have a day off work, but you're usually too out of it to enjoy it, your head spins, and let's not even get into trying to keep your food down. You're miserable, and you wish two things: One, that you will feel healthy again (although sometimes you strongly have your doubts that will happen). And two, that you could share your misery with others.

Thanks to the writers behind these and other situations, we know that the characters we come to know and love have been there with us, and know that they feel our pain while we laugh at them. Which only makes us come to love them more.

Matthew Weaver is the business and agriculture reporter for the Columbia Basin Herald.