Hollywood plays narcolepsy for laughs. A new report reveals the harm it can cause

By Sandee LaMotte, CNN

(CNN) — Candi Wilmot and her 9-year-old daughter Adeline were at the theater watching “Snow White,” the 2025 live-action remake of the beloved 1937 Disney animated classic, when the film suddenly became personal.

“It should have been a fun mother-daughter experience, but it wasn’t at all,” said Wilmot, who has type 1 narcolepsy, defined by excessive daytime sleepiness, vivid hallucinations, sleep paralysis and sudden bouts of muscle weakness or paralysis known as cataplexy.

“The dwarf Sleepy was introduced as ‘narcoleptic cataplexic,’ which I’d never heard of,’ she said. “He would start snoring in the middle of a conversation or even nod off during fight scenes. Or he’d suddenly freeze and topple over in some supposedly funny pratfall.”

“None of that happens in narcolepsy. It wasn’t amusing, and it certainly wasn’t realistic,” she said. “I was offended by the character, realizing my child could be seeing this behavior and questioning my medical condition.”

A new analysis provided exclusively to CNN found films and television shows frequently use narcolepsy — an incurable neurological sleep disorder — as a source of humor, turning a serious condition that affects 1 in 2,000 Americans, and millions worldwide, into slapstick comedy.

For Wilmot, the worst moment occurred when Sleepy stumbled to the edge of a huge chasm in the mine, turned and began to fall backward to his death. Another dwarf caught him just in time.

“After the movie, my daughter asked me, ‘Mom, if you stop taking your meds, would you be like that?’” Wilmot said. “She worried other kids in the theater would see this and think people with narcolepsy put themselves or others in danger.”

‘No one wants to be the butt of a joke’

“Snow White” is among 56 Hollywood productions released between 1983 and 2025 that feature narcolepsy, often only for a laugh, according to an analysis released Tuesday titled “A Representation Wake-up Call: Narcolepsy in Fictional Narrative Entertainment.” The release coincides with World Narcolepsy Day.

The analysis was conducted by the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism — which studies how the entertainment industry affects social, political and cultural life — and Project Sleep, a patient advocacy nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness of sleep disorders.

Although fewer than half of the productions analyzed were comedies, 80% used narcolepsy as a running gag. Among the 41 characters portrayed as having narcolepsy, 68% were depicted as incapable or unreliable.

An episode in season two of the original “Scrubs” series is one example cited in the report. The main character, JD, walks up to Turk, Carla and Elliott and says, “You guys wanna go laugh at the narcoleptic guy?”

As they walk to the patient’s room, JD explains the man’s sleep attacks are triggered by sexual titillation. What follows is a series of unethical attempts by the women to arouse the man and watch him comically collapse into sleep.

“No one wants to be the butt of a joke,” said board certified sleep medicine psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris, a clinical associate professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, who treats people with narcolepsy.

“It was really quite incredible to see just how insensitive the entertainment industry can be,” said Harris, who provided guidance on the project. “If I were a patient with narcolepsy and watched these shows, I’d feel shamed and belittled.”

Stereotypes keep people from treatment

Hollywood’s impact is so pervasive, experts say, that inaccurate depictions of narcolepsy can even affect whether patients seek treatment.

“When I think of narcolepsy, I think of “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” the girl is at the table just falling asleep — and I’m like, ‘alright I don’t have that,’” said former NFL player Josh Andrews, who was quoted in the report. Andrews was diagnosed with narcolepsy at age 26 while playing for the Philadelphia Eagles.

In the 1999 film, Bigalow’s date, Carol, orders soup for the first time. “This is such a treat, I’ve always wanted to try soup but there’s the fear of drowning,” she says before abruptly beginning to snore. Her head snaps forward into the bowl — only to be stopped by her ponytail tied to a railing behind her. Bigalow keeps on eating.

On a date at a bowling alley, Carol tells Bigalow that narcolepsy “isn’t the worst thing you could ever have. I’m just not allowed to fly a plane or drive a car or work in a gun range.” She then passes out on a middle lane while scoring a strike.

Some 82% of characters with narcolepsy in the analysis had exaggerated sleep attacks, said report coauthor Julie Flygare, author of “Wide Awake and Dreaming,” a memoir of her experience with type 1 narcolepsy.

“It’s a trick of the eye where you watch someone fall out of camera view backwards, and there’s a big thud and then you hear them snoring,” said Flygare, President and CEO of Project Sleep.

“That doesn’t happen. We don’t fall like a plank to the floor, or suddenly stop talking and snore, or topple over into our food,” Flygare said. “The exhaustion of narcolepsy is less obvious to outsiders, generally occurring over several minutes with time to sit or lie down. With cataplexy, our knees might buckle and we might crumble to the ground, but we are fully conscious.”

A blow to self-worth

Some people with narcolepsy struggle professionally — at times because of exhaustion, but also because of stigma in the workplace.

“People with narcolepsy can be labeled by bosses, coworkers, teachers and even their loved ones as careless, incompetent, antisocial or inferior to others,” said Erica Rosenthal, director of research at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center and coauthor of the report.

In the first episode of the Netflix series “The Recruit” from 2022, Janus Ferber, an overworked, incredibly stressed-out lawyer for the CIA, falls asleep during a staff meeting. His boss throws a pen at his head and says, “Hey, knock it off. Nobody’s buying the narcolepsy crap, I don’t care what your doctor’s note says.” The show was canceled after the release of the second season.

Making fun of people’s differences or medical conditions may have been the norm in the early days of the entertainment industry, but today Hollywood prefers to reward more inclusive, socially conscious and medically accurate storytelling.

A predominantly deaf cast propelled the 2021 film “CODA” to an Oscar for best picture, while Troy Kotsur became first male deaf actor to win a best supporting actor award. “Love on the Spectrum” has captured 10 Emmy Awards for its authentic representation of the dating lives of young autistic adults. The HBO Max medical drama, “The Pitt,” won a 2025 Norman Lear Award for its accurate depiction of emergency medicine. (HBO Max is part of Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN.)

Yet even the best intentions can go awry. In the 2026 season two finale of “The Pitt,” narcolepsy was used as a humorous plot point. People in the ER’s reception area are told that a man who died after waiting all day to be seen had “hyper-narcolepsy.” “He sure looks dead,” the man sitting next to him replied.

“Our Hollywood Health and Society team works with ‘The Pitt’ on just about every episode and the show has multiple medical advisors on set while they are shooting,” Rosenthal said. “But sleep medicine is a specialty, and the show is focused on accuracy in emergency medicine.

“These long-standing stereotypes can fall through the cracks without anyone necessarily realizing it. We find that most writers are receptive — they’re not looking to marginalize people. It just doesn’t occur to them sometimes.”

CNN requested comment from representatives for “Snow White,” “Scrubs,” “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” “The Recruit” and “The Pitt” but did not hear back before publication.

‘The Simpsons’ proves it can be done

There are positive representations of narcolepsy in Hollywood, but they are rare, according to the report. “The Mysterious Benedict Society” gets kudos for its mostly accurate depiction of identical twin brothers who have type 1 narcolepsy.

“The plot of the 2023 film, ‘Wake,’ thoughtfully included the hallucinations that can occur in narcolepsy. And the 1983 show ‘Hill Street Blues’ offered a fairly accurate representation of cataplexy,” Flygare said.

However, the real standout, according to the report, is a decades-long sitcom, “The Simpsons,” which satirizes American culture through the eyes of the animated family.

Executive producer and showrunner Al Jean responded to a tweet Flygare sent after learning that “The Simpsons” planned to feature narcolepsy in its 2015 season 27 premiere, titled “Every Man’s Dream.”

“Julie tweeted me saying, ‘I hope that this is a good portrayal, not the typical TV portrait of narcolepsy’, and so I wrote back and said, ‘What do you think we should say?’” Jean told CNN. “I really appreciated it, because it’s easy to miss things when you’re doing 20 to 24 episodes a year.

“It was important that we portrayed narcolepsy correctly. In fact, we try to be more accurate than medical shows like ‘The Pitt,’” Jean added. “People have often said we’re more accurate than shows that purport to be real.”

The episode shows Homer undergoing a hospital workup, including a spinal tap, a procedure that is often needed to verify a narcolepsy diagnosis — the only production in the report to include a real diagnostic workup.

“Al is really too modest when it comes to his role in this,” Flygare said. “I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve contacted to offer our guidance on representing narcolepsy. Al’s one of the only people to respond and then actually take our suggestions.”

There’s no lack of humor in the scene. Homer’s son Bart rushes over to the wall to “pull the plug” on his dad, and the doctor tells Homer, “I will mess you up,” when Homer suggests not paying the hospital bill.

At home, Homer immediately plants himself in his favorite spot — the living room sofa — and holds up a sign that says “narcolepsy” when asked to do any chore, including changing the baby’s diaper.

“We focused the humor on how Homer tried to use the diagnosis to get out of work — that’s Homer and the narcolepsy just helped us let Homer be Homer,” Jean said. “That way we were able to use narcolepsy in a funny scene without insulting those with the condition.”

It’s a model for much needed change in the entertainment industry, experts say. Candi Wilmot agrees.

“When medical conditions are portrayed inaccurately, those of us living with them have to deal with the misunderstandings afterward,” Wilmot said. “I want audiences to understand that having narcolepsy doesn’t make someone lazy and unable to stay awake. It’s a neurological disorder that affects different aspects of our lives every day.”

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