I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

In a characteristically Woody Allen blend of romance and hypochondria, the line treats the physical symptoms of infatuation—nausea, tingling, nervous excitement—as indistinguishable from genuine illness. The joke hinges on deflating the grandeur of “being in love” by comparing it to smallpox, an extreme and absurd alternative. Beneath the gag is a familiar Allen theme: modern self-consciousness and anxiety can make emotional experience feel like pathology. The quip also captures how love can be both exhilarating and unsettling, producing bodily sensations that invite comic misinterpretation when filtered through a neurotic, medically fixated worldview.