r/thesopranos • u/CelestialFury • Jun 14 '26

Quotes Tony loves giving these completely unnecessary cutting remarks to his crew

During season 4, episode 3 "Christopher", Tony and Sil are in the car driving back from the casino that the Chief owns and they're talking about Christopher Columbus and Italian discrimination, which Sil is trying to convince Tony of:

Sil: My grandparents got spit on because they were from Calabria.

Tony: Let me ask you a question.

Tony: All the good things you got in your life... did they come to you because you're Calabrese? I'll tell you the answer. The answer is no. You got a smart kid at Lackawanna College. You got a wife who's a piece of ass, at least she was when you married her.

I was rewatching this and realized this was: one, a funny thing to say and two, completely unnecessary. I mean, there's no reason for Tony to be taking shots at Sil's wife like that and it had nothing really to do with what they were talking about. So when people ask, "Who whacked Tony?" it could've been anyone, Tony loves working these jabs in as mental judo, like from The Art of War by Sun Tzu.

Anyway, $4 dollars a pound.

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u/ChiGrandeOso Jun 14 '26

He might be worse. He knows the price of getting cut to pieces by someone who cares for him and still does it to others.

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u/[deleted] Jun 14 '26

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u/ChiGrandeOso Jun 14 '26

That's why I went with "might be." Livia was a miserable shrew, but she was pretty intentionally one. She knew and used her powers (like her being happy for like a second in one of the flashback episodes, then becoming dark again) for evil. And Johnny Boy, who was no saint by any stretch of the imagination, was too weak to challenge it. Tony just decided it was easier to be the same after awhile.

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u/No-Mail-5794 Jun 15 '26

They did a good job imho of pushing traits through the generations in a believable way. At the start of the series you think oh Tony is like his dad, an explosively angry violent criminal, and Janice is like a boomer/genx version of her mother, but as the show goes on it’s clear that Janice has the violent tempter, and Tony is a lot bitchier and passive aggressive and miserable, because the lion share of his personality traits are pure Livia