I love that scene when they are staying in a hotel and Tony goes past Paulie's room and he is laughing again and again like a total fucking idiot at some moronic comedy. In fact it's not LIKE an idiot, he is an idiot, a total simpleton, of course we know this already as by now there have been fifty odd episodes, but this hammers it home so hard how... childlike he is. I often enjoy this trope in films of fuckwitted killers and totally uncool hitmen.
I think it's a sort of antidote to the glamourisation of ninja type outsider assassins in countless films and books over the years. If you get killed by Paulie Walnuts you are just as dead as if you get killed by the most deadly James Bond super sexy Russian secret agent... and it just reminds you of the mundanity of murder or something.
I was reminded of that scene at a party the other day. This French girl we know; beautiful, sophisticated, wealthy etc hired this big place in the country for her birthday party. Loads of people there, mainly French I suppose, and I was chatting to this guy at one point, turned out to be her brother, also strikingly handsome and so on... when he realised I was English he wanted to talk about comedy, British comedy, specifically Little Britain - and he was quoting all these scenes at me and laughing and laughing going "It's so funny ho ho ho" - it was weird, it felt grotesque, I never really seen the thing but I get the impression that it's not something a grown man - let alone a Parisienne sophisticate - should be laughing and spluttering over like that to the point where he can't talk. From then on I could only think of him as a child in the body of a man.