Well, first, let’s be clear: "He's standing right behind me, isn't he?" is not a Marvel invention. It's a classic comedy trope that predates the MCU by decades. It showed up in sitcoms, cartoons, rom-coms, buddy cop movies—basically any genre that needed a rant to be followed by a punchline. It was a reliable beat: Character A talks smack, character B is revealed to be standing right there, cue the awkward laugh. It’s comedy comfort food.
But somewhere along the line, people started attributing it to Marvel. And not just casually—like, full-on "This is the problem with Marvel's writing" attribution. It became a meme. A stereotype. An entire representation of what internet critics dubbed "the MCU tone."
Which is wild, because the line didn't really show up until after the meme was already established. The first actual close usage in a Marvel-adjacent movie was Deadpool 2. Not an MCU film at the time. But there it is: Deadpool, mid-rant, mid-break-the-fourth-wall, looks up and says, "He's standing right behind YOU, isn't he?" while facing the person in question (Cable). The joke isn't just the line—it's the fact that the line makes no sense. It's a parody of a parody.
Then came Deadpool & Wolverine, where the line gets the full meta treatment. This time it is said correctly, and followed immediately by Deadpool turning around and greeting Logan with: "Welcome to the MCU. You're coming in at a low point." It’s the meme made flesh, and it knows it. Deadpool isn’t just joining the MCU—he’s dragging its cultural baggage in with him.
Technically, Thor also says the line in Thor: Love and Thunder, but that movie is so bad and doesn't represent the “MCU type of humor” That it doesn’t count.
So here’s the million-dollar question: if nobody said it, how did it become an MCU trope?
Because it feels like they did.
It feels like something someone said during one of the many Marvel scenes where a character is quipping their way out of danger. It feels like it happened, because the vibe of the MCU has always walked that razor-thin line between emotional stakes and "let's undercut this moment with a zinger." And the internet—oh, the internet—it loves a pithy quote to latch onto. It doesn't matter if it happened. It matters that it feels like it did.
People, especially film critics, who did not find the MCU appealing didn’t have to check the scripts or binge watch all the movies. They saw Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers, maybe a trailer or two, and said, “Ah. I know this kind of humor. This is 'He's standing right behind me, isn't he?' humor.”
These critics made their point in their reviews, other people repeated and retweeted these points and bam! Trope attached.
So now we’ve got a trope that wasn’t in the MCU, made famous because people thought it was, and now it actually is. This is internet mythology at work—repeating something until it becomes true.
But let’s not pretend the MCU doesn’t have a tone problem. It kind of does. We’ve all seen the serious, dramatic scene immediately undercut by a punchline. Emotional death? Quip. World-ending threat? Quip. Existential dread? Quip. It’s not always bad, but it’s often exhausting. (Well, Endgame mostly resisted that. Let’s give it a gold star.)
"He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?" isn’t about Marvel’s dialogue—it’s about how the internet works. It's about how criticism is taught, replicated and used as ammo.
No one hated the line because it was overused - they hated the line because they needed to win online arguments about how Marvel is destroying cinema. It's a lesson in how easy it is to parrot something online until it feels real. Like that guy who swears pineapple on pizza is a crime against nature. He’ll argue it with full confidence. Has he ever actually tasted it? No. He just read it somewhere. Repeated it. Made it his whole personality. Like some lazy, unoriginal, overconfident internet loudmouth who never fact-checks before he—
Wait.
He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?
