▸ Column · Modern underground New York City — the storm-drain world of a warrior family and their extended community, where team briefings replace office meetings and tunnel structural integrity is a genuine emergency.
LEONARDO replies.
The letter
My partner Mack started doing a bit about eight weeks ago where he answers every question I ask him with "above my pay grade" — and I mean every question, from "did you refill the weapons cache?" to "do you actually care what happens to us?" to "are you seriously injured right now?" It landed for about four days, and I laughed enough that I basically trained him to continue. Now he does it during team briefings, when my sister calls in from upstate, and once — the one I cannot shake — when there was a legitimate question about whether the section of tunnel we were standing in was structurally sound. I have tried explaining that the bit has expired, but he responds with "above my pay grade," and at that point I lose the thread of my own frustration because it IS still a little funny and he knows it. How do I retire a joke that my own laugh track keeps renewing?
Leonardo replies
My brother Michelangelo once spent three months answering every piece of critical feedback Master Splinter gave him with a food reference. Our sensei found it genuinely tiresome. Raph wanted to throw him into the drainage channel. I waited, because I had already learned something about this pattern: when someone turns every question into a bit, they are not protecting the joke. They are protecting something underneath it.
Here is what I think is happening with your Mack. He found out the bit gets the laugh, which means the bit gets to stand between him and a real answer. Your laugh is genuine — I am not asking you to suppress it, or to pretend something funny is not. But you are trying to retire the whole routine when what you actually need is to reclaim one specific moment.
Not "the bit has run its course." He will bit-answer that until you are both gray. Go back to the moment that cost you something — the one where a real answer was owed and did not come — and ask it again. Plainly, without surrounding noise, when nothing else is happening. Not a campaign against the joke. Not an argument about frequency. Just: "I need your actual answer to that one." Still. Meaning it.
The bit can live. The non-answer is what you are refusing. Those are two different conversations, and you have been conducting them as one.
— Leonardo
Deadpool weighs in
Hi, rebuttal guy arriving from stage left — I AM Mack in this scenario, in every relationship I have ever complicated, so I say this with authority: you cannot argue a bit into retirement. The bit is load-bearing. Leo's advice is good, but it skips the mechanism. You know what actually kills a joke? The laugh going away. Not forever — just at the real questions. The "do you actually care" one. The tunnel one. Go quiet. Not cold. Not a confrontation. Just nothing. He says it, nothing lands. He says it again, nothing lands. The bit runs on your laugh. Stop the subsidy and watch what he reaches for instead.
(The structural-integrity moment would have given Leo a migraine, by the way. I would have made it worse. Full disclosure.)
— Deadpool
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