If you go onto You Tube, you get your choice of Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Michael Shannon, Morgan Freeman, Gilbert Gottfried and countless others reading it. Michael Shannon does it the best, IMHO.
You can even see Hitler’s reaction to receiving the email:
The reason why all these celeb.s are willing to do this, IMHO, is that it is brilliant writing. Think about sitting down to pen something indicating that you are really pissed with some co-workers, then see if you could come up with something that matches the vitriole and pure emotion that this email conveys. She even came up with a new insult -cunt punt - that has taken on a life of its own. It was punned off of on the Daily Show. There are a boat load of movies featuring threatening bad guys whose dialog can’t hold a candle to what the college student wrote.
It seems that it was new to a number of people here but, no, it’s not a new turn of phrase (and neither is the related “cunt punch.”) My recollection is about 10 years old, and in another thread I was able to find it used on the Internet in 2003 (and actually a couple times before that, but I didn’t count them as they weren’t really used in a sense that made it sound like it was current slang. For instance, one use in the late 90s was in a poem with all sorts of rhyming pairs like that), but it didn’t seem to really start getting traction until about 2005, at least in writing. Some Dopers recall it from the mid-to-late 90s, which is not unreasonable to me, but I wouldn’t swear by it. But “cunt punt” is not a neologism coined by the writer of that email.
Although the piece provides good emotive opportunity for an actor or very expressive comedian, it honestly is not a particularly witty or clever piece of comedic writing.
And “cunt-punt” is about as new as the word “punt”.
Cunt punt was new to me, guess I don’t travel in the right circles.
This letter is not intended to be either comedic nor witty nor clever. It is a hate-filled rant - pure and simple.
I’d challenge anyone charged with writing a hate-filled rant to do it better. Bonus points if you can muster the same emotional intensity about a subject as inane and unimportant as the one in the letter.
More like you travel in more civilized circles. At any rate, you’re right that she’s contributed to the general public’s awareness of the term, though.
More like you travel in more civilized circles. At any rate, you’re right that she’s contributed to the general public’s awareness of the term, though. (I didn’t realize how non-widespread this piece of slang was, though, until reading through these the threads about this. Then again, there’s supposedly wide-spread slang like “no homo” which I’ve never heard anyone use in real life and only first encountered on this message board a few weeks or months ago seems to be universally understood.)
