50 Moments That Prove ‘The Sopranos’ Is a Comedy
Order your hits now, because The Sopranos is a comedy.
Sure, it may have won 21 Emmys for drama, but there’s no way that a show with that many funny characters spouting that many classic one-liners isn’t a comedy. From Christopher’s malaprops, to Tony’s ridiculous fits of rage, to just about anything involving Paulie Walnuts, The Sopranos has supplied some of the biggest laughs in the history of television.
You can fight me about it, but just know that I’ve assembled an almost-literal murderers’ row to back me up, including cast members Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore, Robert “A.J. Soprano” Iler, John “Artie Bucco” Ventimiglia, Joe “Vito Spatafore” Gannascoli, Dan “Philly and Patsy Parisi” Grimaldi and Ray “Little Carmine” Abruzzo as well as Terence Winter, the writer and producer behind many of the show’s funniest moments. (The only person to write more episodes of The Sopranos than Winter? David Chase, the show’s creator.)
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A collection of heavy hitters also helped me with the ranking itself. Namely: Famed Sopranos expert (and Rolling Stone staff writer) Miles Klee, Connor Crawford, the creator of the Sopranos Out of Context Instagram account and Marc Dee, the guy who runs The Sopranos Club and The Sopranos News Minute Twitter/X accounts.
We purposefully left what constitutes a “moment” flexible by design. It could be a single line — like Silvio calling someone a “Cheese Fuck.” Or an entire scene — like Paulie visiting a medium. We tried to rank them purely by how funny they are, but we also gave consideration to a joke’s staying power — like A.J.’s legendary demand for “fuckin’ ziti.”
But they all have one thing in common — they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that The Sopranos is indeed a comedy.
Paulie’s Visit to Italy
Paulie Walnuts (the late Tony Sirico) is easily the single funniest character on the show. While Paulie’s most hilarious scenes typically involved flashes of anger, the Italy-set episode “Commendatori” is a fish-out-of-water story that highlighted Paulie’s ignorance of Italy (“Can I just get some macaroni and gravy?”) as well as his personality quirks (for instance, his hopeless pursuit of a clean bathroom).
Those quirks weren’t exactly fictional either. “Tony wouldn’t let nobody touch his hair,” Pastore tells me. “He did it before he came to work. When we were in Italy, we had a day off, and we were staying in Naples. Me and Sirico said, ‘Let’s go to the Isle of Capri.’ We had to take a ferry. On the ferry, I’m upstairs, and Tony is downstairs. I went down and said, ‘Tony, what are you doing down here? Come up and look at the bay, it’s beautiful.’ He said, ‘I don’t want to mess up my hair.’”
“Tony didn’t try to be funny,” Pastore continues. “Tony didn’t think he was funny, but we knew he was funny. There were times where I couldn’t control myself laughing. Tony and I kind of grew up together, and in The Sopranos, it was like we were just ourselves. It was Big Pussy and Paulie, but it was really Vinny and Tony.”
Christopher’s Screenplay
Christopher’s humor generally originated from him being stupid and reckless, which is on full display as he writes his screenplay for Made Man in Season One. “When they show his screenplay, it’s like the worst thing you’ve ever seen,” explains Klee. “He can’t spell anything. The funniest is the line, ‘I must be loyle to my Capo.’ All the movie stuff with Christopher is so funny.”
Tony and Artie’s Food Fight
Artie is catering an event at the Soprano house when Tony (James Gandolfini) comes over to him to gripe about all the people in his house. Artie replies with a snarky, “Why’d you invite them?” before talking about his recently burned-down restaurant Vesuvio. Tony shouts at him to get over it — primarily out of guilt as Tony burned it down because his Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) was gonna have someone whacked there — and Artie responds by throwing cold cuts in his face. It soon turns into a two-man food fight that cuts the tension (Artie suspects that Tony might have been behind the restaurant’s fire), and delivers a sweet, boyish moment between the lifelong friends.
“At first, we didn’t know how to do it because the food fight happens so fast,” Ventimiglia says. “It wasn’t working, so I said, ‘Remember on I Love Lucy, where there was a cream-pie fight? They did it real slow. The one person puts a cream pie in the other’s face, and the person looks at the other like, ‘Oh, really? Did you just put a cream pie in my face? Now I’m going to put one in your face.’’ I said that, and David Chase and Jimmy both said, ‘I think you’re right.’ We decided to do it one at a time and create a slow burn.”
Carmella’s Movie Club
Carmella Soprano (Edie Falco) didn’t get a lot of very funny moments. But when she did, they counted. Case in point, says Klee: “One of my favorite funny scenes was Carmella making the other wives watch Citizen Kane. She then tries to lead a discussion on it, but they don’t have any of the vocabulary. Carmella just goes, ‘There was the cinematography,’ then they all go silent before they start gossiping.”
Paulie and Silvio Chaperone A.J. to a School Dance
“One of the great things about The Sopranos is seeing those guys do normal things,” says Winter. “Part of the comedy just comes from watching a mob boss do something normal. I always tell this story, but we were at one of our premieres and Tony Soprano is at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of cereal. He’s just absent-mindedly reading the back of the box of cereal, and the audience is howling. It’s such a normal, human thing to do, but when you see a mob boss do it, it’s absurd.”
Another good example of this is when A.J. goes to a school dance and Paulie and Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) are his chaperones. They just glare at A.J. and his date in the back of a limousine. To A.J., everything is normal, but his date — who is like a foot taller than him — is hilariously uncomfortable.
‘You Remember Your First Blow Job?’
In Season Two’s “Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” Paulie cracks the following joke to Silvio:
Paulie: You remember your first blow job?
Silvio: Yeah.
Paulie: How long did it take for the guy to cum?
The joke, of course, isn’t the funny thing here. It’s that Paulie immediately turns to Tony, who is sitting next to him, and proceeds to repeat the joke verbatim.
“Tony Sirico was unreal,” says Iler. “Once the show got going, he was like, ‘I’m Uncle Tony. If you ever have a problem with anybody, you let me know.’ He came to my confirmation with an envelope stuffed with cash and put it in my suit pocket. Sometimes people say to me, ‘I wish I got to meet Tony Sirico,’ and I’m always like, ‘You did.’ If you watch Tony Soprano for seven seasons, you never met Jim, but if you watch one episode of The Sopranos, that is Tony Sirico.”
‘Nobody Told Them About the Kind of Gas Mileage That Thing Gets’
Given that he was the head of two families, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that Tony was the unrivaled master of the dad joke. As Klee wrote in 2022, “The guy was never, ever without a dad joke. Sure, sometimes Tony just wanted to make his kids cringe with a stupid pun — the essence of dad humor is second-hand embarrassment. But the gags were also a screen, an act that would have you believe he was a harmless goofball, not a depressed, angry and dangerous criminal. He could also use this side of his persona to tilt reality in the way he preferred. After foiling an attempt on his life, he pretends it was a carjacking gone wrong and, in the hospital, says of the SUV his attackers supposedly wanted, ‘I guess nobody told them about the kind of gas mileage that thing gets.’”
Paulie Explains the Cuban Missile Crisis
If Paulie is the funniest Sopranos character, “Pine Barrens” is unquestionably its funniest episode. In it, Paulie and Christopher are lost in the frigid woods of South Jersey looking for a Russian soldier they thought they’d already killed. The episode has dozens of funny jokes and moments, and its tone is established right at the start when Christopher and Paulie visit the Russian’s apartment and are casually talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
“Russians? They’re not all bad,” Christopher maintains.
“How about the Cuban Missile Crisis? Cocksuckers moved nuclear warheads into Cuba — pointed ‘em right at us,” Paulie parries back.
“That was real?” Christopher replies. “I saw that movie. I thought it was bullshit.”
“The comedy in The Sopranos came naturally,” Winter reiterates. “There’s such an organic absurdity to these characters — even in the reality of their world, they’re kind of ludicrous. One of the first notes David Chase ever gave me was, ‘You don’t need to write jokes. You just need to write behavior.’ I had done some sitcom work, so my tendency was to set up a joke and then pay it off, but he said to stop doing that, just let it happen organically.”
Tony B Plays Poker
Steve Buscemi’s Tony Blundetto wasn’t on the show very long, but the character had his jokes, most of which were delivered with an intentional, Groucho Marx-like delivery. Such as during a poker game at the Bada Bing when he tells the heavyset Vito, who is shuffling cards, “You gonna deal those? They’re not candy bars, you can let some of ‘em go.” He later points at Paulie’s hair and jokes, “You let that dry before you put on a second coat? Fucking Grandpa Munster over here.”
‘Don’t You Have a Vase?’
Here’s one of the many old-school jokes Uncle Junior tells on the show: “Guy comes home with a bouquet of flowers for his wife. ‘I guess I’ll have to spread my legs now?’ she says. ‘Why?’ he asks, ‘Don’t you have a vase?’”
Granted, most of these jokes speak to his generation’s brand of racism and sexism — “You hear about the Chinese godfather?” — but there’s a certain old-man charm to his delivery, and they provide the oft-frustrated character with a rare bit of levity.
“Like Paulie, Uncle Junior was very naturally funny,” says Winter. “At another premiere, there was this moment where Uncle Junior just walks into a room and apropos of nothing, he says, ‘I’ve fucking had it!’ and the audience just howled. He’s just a grumpy old man. You don’t even know what he’s had it with. He’s just pissed off, and you know him so well that it’s automatically funny.”
‘Louis Brasi Sleeps with the Fishes’
In the pilot, Big Pussy and Christopher are disposing of a body when they get into a disagreement because Christopher misquotes The Godfather. Or as he puts it, “Louis Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”
“Luca Brasi, Luca,” Big Pussy corrects him.
“That scene was scripted,” Pastore says. “But what wasn’t scripted was that we couldn’t get the body in the dumpster. So I said, ‘F this, let’s take it over to Staten Island’ — that wasn’t in the script.”
‘When’s the Last Time You Had a Prostate Exam?’
There are a number of funny, prostate-related moments between Tony and his therapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). But the best is when Tony admits he’s suffering from erectile dysfunction. Melfi says that it may not be due to the antidepressants she’s put him on and asks, “When’s the last time you had a prostate exam?”
“Hey, I don’t even let anybody wag their finger in my face,” Tony retorts.
Melfi bursts out laughing in an early break in her professionalism, helping to establish the lines that will get blurred in her and Tony’s relationship over future seasons.
Bobby’s Hunting Outfit
This is mostly a sight gag, though Tony’s reaction really brings it home. “(In “Pine Barrens,” Christopher and Paulie) are going to go into the woods in loafers and a leather jacket,” Winter explains. “I grew up in Brooklyn with guys like this. In the winter, wearing a winter coat was almost a sign of weakness. My idiot friends would wear a thin leather jacket when it was 20 degrees out, and they’d be shivering. The irony in this scene is, the one guy who is the goofball in the show knows what it means to go out into the woods, so he shows up looking like Elmer Fudd.”
‘You Got a Bee on You Hat’
“Something I always laugh at is when Tony and Furio are threatening a guy on the golf course, and Furio slaps the guy’s hat off and says, ‘You got a bee on you hat,’” says Klee.
Cristopher Inadvertently Kills Adriana’s Dog
Christopher relapses in Season Four, and while he’s high and watching The Little Rascals on TV, he passes out on top of Adriana’s dog Cosette, smothering her to death. “That was David Chase. He came up with that,” says Winter. “I’ve always been a huge fan of The Little Rascals, so I thought it’d be so funny if he’s just mesmerized by a Little Rascals episode while he’s high. It’s that juxtaposition — the unbelievable darkness of sitting on that poor dog while watching this stupid kids’ show — that made it more absurd, tragic and funny.”
‘Your Father Never Had the Makings of a Varsity Athlete’
When Uncle Junior is grappling with Alzheimer’s, he keeps repeating how Tony “never had the makings of a varsity athlete.” It infuriates Tony every time, which is where the humor originates. “Gandolfini really got the comedy — especially the comedy of frustration, the Ralph Kramden stuff,” says Winter. “There’s a lot of Honeymooners in The Sopranos. I wanted to do a dream sequence where Jim imagines he’s Ralph Kramden, Michael (Imperioli) is Ed Norton and Edie Falco is Alice. It never quite worked, but we did talk about how there was a very thin line between Ralph Kramden and Tony.”
‘I Could Have Taken Ecstasy, But I Didn’t’
“One of my favorite Meadow lines is when she gets in trouble for using Livia’s house for a party,” says Klee. “She’s trying to get out of it, and she goes, ‘I could have taken ecstasy but I didn’t.’ It’s a really well-written, kid-in-trouble type of response.”
‘Chicken’s Nice and Spicy, Huh?’
“Like Paulie and Christopher, Bobby Bacala and Uncle Junior were a great combination,” Winter tells me. “Early on, when Steve Schirripa was cast in Season Two, Uncle Junior was under house arrest, and we spent a lot of time in the house with Uncle Junior. Steve Schirripa called me one day, and he was like, ‘Are we ever gonna get out of the house?’ I said, ‘You don’t want to get out of the house. As long as he’s under house arrest, he needs somebody to talk to and that’s you. You want to be in that house as much as possible because you and Dominic (Chianese) are going to have these amazing scenes.’”
For instance, Junior finds out he can leave the house to attend funerals, so he begins attending every funeral he can, treating them like social events. The best of the bunch is when he attends the obviously tragic funeral of a small child. But while everyone else is solemn and distraught, Junior is happily munching away on chicken. So much so that when Bobby tells him it’s time to leave, Junior responds, “Relax, we just got here.” He then turns to a random mourner and says, “Chicken’s nice and spicy, huh?”
Patsy Pees in Tony’s Pool
In the aftermath of the notoriously ambiguous series finale, many have speculated that Tony was killed when the camera cut to black — possibly by, or with the help of, Patsy Parisi, a member of Tony’s crew whose twin brother was executed on orders from Tony.
In fact, at one point, a drunken Patsy stumbles into Tony’s backyard and plans to kill him as revenge. He points a gun at Tony from a distance, but breaks down in tears and chickens out. Before he leaves, though, he makes sure to take a leak in Tony’s pool.
“When I first read the script for this episode, it was very uplifting because I knew I’d be known as the guy who peed in Tony’s pool — I knew people would be able to recognize me as that,” says Grimaldi. “That said, people don’t understand what goes into something like that. There was a hose that ran up my leg, and there was a valve by my belt, next to the gun. The first time I did it, I shot it into the next yard. For the second take, they said they wanted an arc so they could bounce the light off of it, which I got right away.”
Ralphie’s Death
“Ralphie’s death is pretty hilarious,” says Connor Crawford, referring to the series of scenes in which Tony kills crew member Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano) for maybe murdering Tony’s horse, followed by the cleanup of his body.
Two moments in particular delight him. The first is when a very high Christopher comes to help Tony with the body. When Tony accuses him of taking drugs, Christopher hilariously mispronounces the word “didn’t” in his denial, sounding more like “I di-dent,” which Crawford says die-hard fans love. The second is when Christopher freaks out after mistakenly pulling off Ralphie’s wig. “Talk about sight gag,” Crawford laughs.
Big Pussy Kills an Elvis Impersonator
“Not a lot of people mention this scene, but I love it,” says Pastore. “Me and Skip, the FBI agent, are in a party shop, and I’m giving him information. We see this guy who imitates Elvis Presley, and he’s saying, ‘Pus! What are you doing man here?’ I tell him that Skip is my cousin. Later, I go to his house and kill him, hitting him over the head with a fucking hammer.”
Livia Runs Over Her Friend
“Livia (Nancy Marchand) has a couple of phrases that almost amount to sitcom catchphrases,” says Klee of Tony’s mother. “‘I don’t like that kind of talk’ and ‘I wish the lord would take me’ are the big two.”
But nothing can really top the dark comedy of her accidentally running over her friend. “At Livia’s memorial, that woman makes another appearance, and she says, ‘She was my best friend,’” says Marc Dee. “She’s also in a wheelchair, which is a nice touch.”
‘Create a Little Dysentery Among the Ranks’
When New York boss Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) finds out that Ralphie was making jokes about Johnny’s wife’s weight, Tony, Silvio and Christopher try to determine who could have told him. Christopher argues it’s the FBI, speculating, “What if Vesuvio is bugged and the feds told Johnny? Why not? Create a little dysentery among the ranks.”
“I was always looking for those kinds of things for Christopher,” says Winter. “At one point, he was trying to say, ‘I’m trying to get my feet wet’ or ‘cut my teeth,’ and instead he said, ‘I’m trying to get my teeth wet.’ Those little moments were some of my favorite things to write.”
A.J. Doesn’t Know What Gutters Are
When Tony and Carmella are trying (and failing) to punish A.J., Carmella tells him, “No computer!”
“I use the computer for school,” A.J. responds.
When Carmella says to use the typewriter, A.J. retorts, “Dad threw it out.”
Tony orders him to clean the garage, only for Carmella to inform him, “Jackie Jr. did that the other day.”
Finally, they both tell A.J. he’s going to clean the gutters, and A.J. just goes, “What gutters?”
“A.J. is meant to be annoying,” Iler tells me. “I understood at a young age the parents’ perspective of an annoying kid, where you’re doing everything for him, and yet, he’s still just an ungrateful brat.”
“I loved that people hated A.J.,” he continues. “Tony’s a fucking murderer — he’s killing people in his own family, and they love him. But because this kid is annoying, they hate him. That’s so funny to me.”
Christopher’s Happy Birthday Call to Tony
Near the end of the series, Tony and Bobby get into a fight. A frustrated and defeated Tony is sitting lakeside, licking his wounds, when Christopher calls him. Tony answers, and a very chipper Christopher tells him, “Hey T, it’s me. Just wanted to wish you a belated happy birthday.” Without saying a word, Tony hangs right up on him.
Christopher’s Menage a Trois Fail
“Christopher trying for a threeway with Adriana and an FBI agent is a really funny situation, and it all goes south on him in a really funny way,” says Klee. “The best part comes at the end when Adriana says, ‘You were saying she had a nice ass,’ and Christopher goes, ‘I was trying to say something positive ‘cause she’s your friend.’”
Janice Beats Up a Soccer Mom
After she marries Bobby, Tony’s sister Janice (Aida Turturro) gets into a fight with an obnoxious soccer mom at one of her new stepkids’ games. “The look in Aida Turturro’s eyes when she goes at that soccer mom is comedic gold,” says Crawford.
‘My Incarceration Was Very Short Term’
This is a great subtly funny moment. Tony and Dr. Melfi are discussing homosexuality after Tony discovers Vito is gay. She points out that many in Tony’s circle have done jail time, and thus, “can’t be strangers to male-male sexual contact.”
“Just for the record,” Tony retorts, “my incarceration was very short term. So I never had any need for any anal, y’know.”
Melfi moves back to the subject of Vito, but Tony cannot let go of the idea that Melfi might think he resorted to gay sex acts in prison. “You think I’m lying, don’t you — about when I was in jail?” he presses her.
Melfi just holds up her hands and says, “I’ve given you no indication that I think you’re lying,” with a slightly bemused look on her face.
“Lorraine Bracco was a very good straight man in those scenes,” says Winter. “And the straight man is often the harder job.” (Pun unavoidable in this context.)
Vito’s Attempt to Psyche Himself Up for a Day of Manual Labor
When Vito is outed and runs away to New Hampshire, he has to get an honest job instead of being a gangster. Over a sequence of him doing manual labor, we hear how he’s internally processing becoming a regular Joe, “10:30, gotta be. Hour and a half, lunch. The halfway fuckin’ point. Don’t look at your watch. Not yet. Save it. Treat yourself.”
Cut to a few moments later, and he’s still at it: “Ten to 11, maybe five of. Don’t look. Think of those sandwiches Jim made. When you’ve eaten the last bite, this fuckin’ day is halfway gone.” And then: “11:30, has to be. Look at the angle of the sun. Maybe even a quarter to 12. Okay, look. Now.”
But when Vito looks at his watch, the time reads just 9:55. “Fuck me!” he shouts.
A few years ago, Gannascoli told me that many fans have mentioned to him that this is their favorite scene in the series because it reminds them of their own incredibly slow workdays.
Little Carmine’s Attempt to Assuage Concerns About His Ability to Lead
Little Carmine Lupertazzi, the idiot son of New York boss Carmine Lupertazzi, is the closest thing to pure comic relief on the show. He’s constantly mispronouncing or misstating something, never more so that when he’s trying to convince his crew that they should be confident in him succeeding his father. “The fundamental question is, will I be as effective as a boss like my dad was?” he asks. “And I will be. Even more so, but until I am, it’ll be hard to verify that I think I’ll be more effective.”
“In terms of malaprops,” says Winter, “Little Carmine has got a million of them. We also took a lot of verbatim George W. Bush stuff and gave it to him. That ‘effective’ quote was a quote from George W. Bush.”
The Beautiful French City of Captain Teebs
Tony isn’t that much better in the malaprop department. When he tells Dr. Melfi that he’s admitting his mother to the Green Grove retirement community, Melfi says, “It’s a beautiful facility. It’s more like a hotel at Cap d’Antibes.” In response, Tony nods and says, “Yeah,” clearly unfamiliar with the French city.
A couple of scenes later, Tony and Livia are arguing about Green Grove, and he repeats to her what Melfi had told him earlier: “Green Grove is a retirement community, and it’s more like a hotel at Captain Teebs!”
“Who’s he?” Livia asks.
“A captain who owns luxury hotels or something,” he replies.
Peeps’ Headstone
When the Soprano crew supplies the headstone for slain New York soldier Joey “Peeps” Peparelli, Tony is furious to find out that it reads “PEEPS,” telling Silvio, “Peeps? That’s a fuckin’ nickname — family name is Peparelli.” Silvio nods and says, “They’re gonna redo it. Fuckin’ Jason, he’s dyslexic.”
“They’re just knuckleheads,” Winter says. “Plus, (Steven Van Zandt) is tremendously funny in real life and a huge Marx Brothers fan. He really got the humor.”
Paulie and Feech La Manna’s Gardener Battle
In Season Five, Paulie gets into a dispute with the recently-released-from-prison Feech La Manna (Robert Loggia) about whose landscaping business is going to get the rights to a certain area of the neighborhood. When Paulie finds Feech-backed gardeners working his territory and they don’t agree to make his gardener whole, he hits one of them in the head with a shovel, causing the other — who was up in a tree with a safety rope and a chainsaw — to fall and bust his ankles. Paulie then empties the guy’s wallet, steals his lawnmower and demands that he now get 10 percent of their business.
The punchline to the whole thing, though, is when Paulie gives Tony his version of events and says, “He jumped out the tree and come at me with a chainsaw!”
“Sirico didn’t play the comedy,” says Winter. “He just showed up and was inherently funny — also inherently terrifying. The first thing he ever said to me when I met him was, ‘You’re the new writer?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Then he got me in a playful headlock — but his playful headlocks would cut off your oxygen — and said, ‘Let me tell you something. You ever write a script where I die, first I die, then you die.’ I don’t think he was kidding.”
All the Times Tony Beat Up Georgie
On four different occasions, Tony gets pissed off at the hopelessly stupid Bada Bing bartender Georgie and beats him to a pulp. Two of these beatings really stand out, though: 1) When Tony beats him with an ice bucket after accusing him of wasting ice, and then shouting “Conserve!” as he’s lying on the floor; and 2) When Tony beats him with a Billy Bass while lecturing, “This is a place of business! That’s an office back there!”
“That poor schmuck couldn’t stop getting in his own way,” explains Winter. “It goes back to commedia dell’arte or The Three Stooges or The Honeymooners. That was a great runner. David and I would go over those scenes and howl like idiots.”
Ralphie’s Prank Calls to Paulie’s Mother
Ralphie decides to get even with Paulie by prank calling his elderly mother. “This is Detective Mike Hunt, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania Police Department,” he tells her. “You have a son, Peter Paul?”
“Oh, my God. What happened?” she answers back.
“He’s all right, ma’am, but I’m afraid he’s in a little trouble,” Ralphie continues. “We found him in a public men’s room in Lafayette Park. I don’t know how to put this delicately — he was sucking a Cub Scout’s dіck. Ma’am, I wish that was all, but I’m afraid we had to have emergency surgery performed upon arrival at headquarters after discovery of a small rodent in the rectal passage. A gerbil, ma’am. The county doesn’t cover medical procedures deemed caused by criminal sеxual activity — Section Four, Paragraph 15. We’ll need an insurance number.”
“This was pure comedy,” says Crawford. “Ralphie’s a funny character, and with scenes like this and the joke about a 95-pound mole on Ginny Sack’s ass, he weaponizes his humor to manipulate people.”
Christopher and Little Carmine Go to Hollywood
Another funny fish-out-of-water story is when Christopher and Little Carmine go to Hollywood for Chistopher’s zombie mobster movie Cleaver. They try to cast Ben Kingsley as the film’s lead, but they end up robbing and punching Lauren Bacall instead.
“When the Cleaver stuff came around, I thought I was done on the show because I’d walked away from the family at that point,” Abruzzo says. “But suddenly, it became that I was a movie producer doing a movie with Christopher. I love when we’re talking to Ben Kingsely, and Christopher refers to ‘Law & Order: The SUV.’”
Patsy and Burt’s Coffee-Chain Shakedown
In Season Six, Patsy and Burt Gervasi (Artie Pasquale) go to shake down a Starbucks-like coffee chain, only to find out it’s impossible to get any money out of them due to their tracking of every penny, their very deep pockets and their utter disregard for their employees’ well-being. After attempting a handful of ways to extort cash from the chain’s manager, Patsy and Burt finally give up, with Patsy lamenting, “It’s over for the little guy.”
“It’s a comment on society and corporate America,” says Grimaldi. “They don’t care about their employees or any outside influences.”
‘Quasimodo Predicted All This’
Tony and Bobby are making small talk when Bobby tells him, “Mom really went downhill after the World Trade Center.” He then adds, “You know, Quasimodo predicted all this.”
After a moment, Tony realizes that Bobby means Nostradamus, and frustratedly has to explain the difference between the two historical figures.
Artie’s ‘Taxi Driver’ Scene
In Season Four, Artie gets ripped off by a French con man named Jean-Philippe and has to confront him to get his money back. Leading up to the conflict, Artie rehearses what he’s going to say in a mirror, a hilarious play on Robert De Niro’s “You talkin’ to me?” scene from Taxi Driver.
“When I created Artie,” says Ventimiglia, “I wanted him to be funny with how expressive he is and how he puts himself in situations that he can’t really get out of. He’s a desperate guy, and that mirror scene is a great example of it. Michael Imperioli wrote that episode. Me and Michael met when I was 19 and he was 17, and we did a lot of things together. Michael’s got a great sense of humor, and in that episode, he gave me a great opportunity to explore the ‘You talkin’ to me’ thing.”
Paulie Visits a Medium
Paulie seeks out an intermediary to the spirit world after Christopher scares him with a dream he had. The medium, however, makes it worse by claiming there are spirits all around Paulie. It gradually becomes clear to both Paulie and the medium that they’re the spirits of the people Paulie has killed. The superstitious Paulie gets spooked, accuses everyone at the group session of dealing in black magic and then throws a chair at the spirits while shouting “Fuckin’ queers!” at them.
Vito in Leather
On the surface, this scene is another sight gag, but it’s much more than that, too — kicking off one of the more impactful storylines in the series, which concludes with Vito being killed for being gay. As for the leather outfit, Gannascoli says, “My first thought when I saw the costume was, ‘I’m not going assless in those fucking chaps, right?’ They said, ‘Nah, you don’t have to worry.’ I was worried, but by now, I’ve embraced it. I’ve even got a bobblehead of me coming out in that outfit.”
Big Pussy as a Fish
Yet another scene that’s both a visual gag and incredibly important to the show’s narrative. In it, Tony dreams that Big Pussy is a fish at a boardwalk seafood market. You obviously don’t need to be a dream expert to figure out the meaning: It confirms for Tony that Pussy is a rat, and thus, he needs to “sleep with the fishes.” It’s still very funny, though.
“They filmed me talking during that recording session because they wanted the lips of the fish to move like my lips move,” Pastore explains. “They filmed my lips and recorded my voice, and then they created the fishes.”
The scene also leads to future funny scenes with the Billy Bass toy. “I’ve signed that fish at a lot of meet-and-greets,” Pastore told me previously. “I wish I could make some money on that, to be honest. As a marketing thing, I wanted my agent to get involved with those people because, after The Sopranos, when people saw that thing — if they were a Sopranos fan — they thought of me.”
‘Hey, Cheese Fuck’
“When Silvio calls the guy ‘Cheese Fuck,’ it’s hilarious,” says Crawford. The insult originates during a high-stakes private poker game in which Silvio is losing and Tony decides to prank him by quietly telling Matthew, a junior gangster, to sweep up the crumbs of cheese by Silvio’s feet.
Just as Tony knew he would, Silvio flips out and accuses Matthew of “playing Hazel.” He then screams at him, “Leave the fucking cheese there, alright? I love fucking cheese at my feet! I stick motherfuckin’ provolone in my socks at night, so they smell like your sister’s crotch in the morning.” He caps off the tirade by calling Matthew the aforementioned “Cheese Fuck” and demanding he get him some food.
Abruzzo says Gandolfini himself was very much the same kind of prankster. For example: “There’s a scene where I bring Tony to go see Phil at Phil’s house, and Butch won’t let us in the house. I’m at the door, and Jimmy is behind me. In my close-up, Jimmy’s hand was on my ass. He was intense, but he was a goofball at the same time.”
‘I’m Reminded of Louis the Whatever’s Finance Minister’
In Little Carmine’s first scene on the show, Tony goes down to Florida to seek his counsel about a dispute with New York. Little Carmine blames a greedy Johnny Sack for the issues, before going into a bizarre, historically-misinformed rant, saying, “I am reminded of Louis the Whatever’s finance minister. He built this chateau — Nicole and I saw it when we went to Paris. It even outshone Versailles (pronounced ‘ver-sales’) where the king lived. In the end, Louis clapped him in irons.”
Abruzzo says he did the scene as written, but “I did choose to say Ver-sales instead of Versailles. The intention was always that this guy spoke beyond his intellect.”
Paulie and Christopher in the Van in ‘Pine Barrens’
Admittedly, it’s probably cheating to count everything that happens between Paulie and Christopher in the van as one moment since it’s really a series of scenes and exchanges. But whether it’s a single scene or not, it’s definitely all gold — from them eating from ketchup packets and Paulie saying, “Not bad, mix it with the relish,” to a starving Christopher shouting, “I’m eating those berries!,” to Christopher theorizing that the still-missing Russian could be stalking them and Paulie snapping back, “With what, his cock?”
“My favorite thing to write is two people under pressure,” says Winter. “These guys are already killers, and they’re desperate to stay alive. They don’t give a fuck about each other. You put them in a van, and they will start turning on each other in a heartbeat. Everything that happens in that van just escalates — they’re starving, they’re freezing, they’re blaming each other for everything. Christopher says, ‘We should have eaten at Roy Rogers,’ and Paulie says, ‘I should’ve fucked Dale Evans, but I didn’t!’”
Uncle Junior Thinks He’s Larry David
Another Alzheimer’s-addled Junior bit, though this one is plenty meta, too. He sees an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm on TV, points to Larry David and says, “Is that me?” Then, when Jeff Garlin joins Larry, he mistakes him for Bobby. “Curb Your Enthusiasm also returned the favor,” Dee explains. “Because there’s this whole thing where Larry can’t find his Sopranos DVD case.”
‘Roadies?’
Forever aggrieved that Janice left him alone to care for their mother, Tony angrily lectures her about it any chance he gets. This time around, he chides, “Free-spirit Janice — rebel without a cause. While I sit here mired in her bullshit, trying to be a good son while you’re off dropping acid and blowing roadies!”
The latter half catches Bobby’s attention, as he’s now romantically involved with Janice. “Roadies?” he asks her, an exasperated, heartbreaking question for him, a hysterical payoff for everybody else.
‘So What, No Fuckin’ Ziti Now?’
“That’s the line I said over and over again at my audition,” says Iler, who credits his famed reaction to the news that the Sopranos matriarch wouldn’t be coming to a family gathering for landing him the part of A.J. in the first place. “As a kid, I probably had been going on auditions for six years, and a lot of the time, they laugh the first time, maybe they laugh the second time, but that’s usually it, because they’ve been hearing it all day. But with this, I remember them laughing every time. I think what they liked is that I didn’t emphasize ‘fuck’ like a lot of the other kids were probably doing — ‘No fuckin’ ziti.’ I was a 12-year-old who said ‘fuck’ all the time, so I played the word like I said everything else. I think they found it comical how comfortable I was with saying it — especially because I looked even younger than 12.”
‘Guy Was an Interior Decorator’
In “Pine Barrens,” during a cell call with poor reception, Tony is trying to tell Paulie who exactly they’re dealing with out there in the woods. Shouting through the static, he says, “The guy you’re looking for is some kind of ex-commando or some shit. He killed 16 Chechen rebels single-handed. He was with the Interior Ministry.”
Paulie appears to get the message, but when he relays it to Christopher, he says, “You’re not gonna believe this. He killed 16 Czechoslovakians. Guy was an interior decorator.”
“His house looked like shit,” a puzzled Christopher replies.
Klee thinks the exchange is “as good as an Abbott and Costello routine,” but Winter tells me it all came to him pretty naturally. “It’s the telephone game — literally,” he explains. “It was just that, and I guess I saw the word ‘interior’ and thought, ‘How would he mess this up?’ Then Christopher’s response is just trying to make sense of that. It’s also so absurd that this guy was a Russian commando, and they think he was an interior decorator.”
Christopher’s Intervention
“Them doing the intervention for Christopher wrong is like something that would happen in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” says Klee.
It was also very real for Winter. “That was actually a thing that happened to me,” he says. “I was Tony in that intervention in real life for somebody I knew. It played out basically the same way. It got very contentious and very accusatory. It became about me and my problems, and it ended with physicality.”
“In the scene, Tony’s fixated on the dog because he loves animals, and he keeps going back to that,” Winter continues. “Adriana goes right to their sex life. Silvio’s got his take where he’s just mad because he saw Christopher with his hair in the toilet water. And Paulie never puts anything in writing, so he just shames Christopher and tells him to ‘take his medicine.’ Meanwhile, Elias Koteas plays the facilitator who is just trying to keep that shit together. It’s all the worst things you don’t want to hear, and it ends up as a free-for-all.”
All of which, of course, is fraught with drama, but also very rich in the kind of humor that The Sopranos did every bit as well as the heavy stuff. “When we’d write our scripts and read each other’s work, nine times out of ten, we’d say, ‘Your script is so funny,’” says Winter. “I rarely remember saying, ‘Oh my God, that was so dramatic.’ Even though the show was a drama — and there are incredibly dramatic moments in it — we’d say, ‘It was so funny. I laughed my ass off.’ We all instinctively knew that there was a huge amount of comedy in The Sopranos. And most importantly, it was the comedy that came from reality, because there’s nothing funnier than how absurd human beings are.”
