Fredo Corleone is the childish, easily-led brother from The Godfather whose weakness and insecurity lead him to betray his family. Chris Cuomo is the childish, easily-led CNN anchor whose weakness and insecurity lead him to getting into public fights with people who call him Fredo.
“Punk-ass bitches from the right call me Fredo!” Cuomo says in this video clip, which presumably starts after he was thusly named by someone. “My name is Chris Cuomo! I’m an anchor on CNN. Fredo is from The Godfather. He’s the weak brother. They use it as an Italian aspersion. Any of you Italian? It’s a fuckin insult to your people. It’s an insult to your fuckin people. It’s like the N-word for us. Is that a cool fuckin thing?”
“You’re a much more reasonable guy in person than you seem on television,” says the man who called him Fredo.
“You wanna play, we’ll fuckin play. If you’ve got something to say about what I do on television then say it.”
“Hey man, listen, I don’t have a problem”
“Well you’re gonna have a big fuckin problem. Don’t fucking insult me. You call me Fredo, I’ll call you punk bitch, you like that? You want that to be your nickname?”
“I didn’t call you that.”
“You called me Fredo! You know my name’s not fuckin Fredo! You did not think my name’s Fredo, don’t be a fuckin liar. Stand up like a man. Own it, own what you said. You’re gonnna have a fuckin problem. I’ll fuckin ruin your shit. I’ll fuckin throw you down these stairs like a fuckin punk.”
“Why don’t you do it then?”
“What, so you can sue? So you can fuckin sue? You called me Fredo, take a fuckin swing.”
Cuomo then becomes angry at someone trying to handle him away from the confrontation—”Watch your hands! Watch your fuckin hands!”—and dissolves into angry repetitions of his earlier threats.
Someone intercedes between them, saying “I’m breaking it up, I’m breaking it up.”
“Hey, look at all these cameras!” says the guy who called him Fredo.
Cuomo falls to silence, wearing the facial expresion of a publicly belligerent media personality who has, indeed, just noticed all the cameras:
Cuomo has the support of Fox News.
