When the same person keeps “joking” about your progress, it isn’t comedy. It’s a review.

A joke that keeps landing on the same spot is not really a joke. Humor lets people say the true thing and keep an exit, so when the digs always aim at what you are working on, you are hearing an opinion with a laugh attached. Once is nothing. The pattern is the message.

Count instead of arguing. If it happens again this week, name it plainly and without heat: you have noticed, and you would rather they just said the thing. How they answer will tell you which it was.