"Within minutes, Star Wars enthusiasts and Walker non-enthusiasts alike descended like locusts, parsing every syllable of what was clearly a joke..."

"Questions from these people flooded Twitter � who is 'that boy?' Who is 'another?' In the original quote, wasn't Yoda referring to Princess Leia? Or alternately, Anakin Skywalker? And what does a woman look like in person? It was just the latest example of a phenomenon that has gripped society in the Internet age. Once an oxymoron, social media has given rise to the 'nerd bully.'"

From "The nerd uprising is upon us," by Christian Schneider.

"He did not commit suicide because of the show. The show didn�t help. It was mean. He felt bullied."

"It was mean-spirited picking at the way he looked for no reason at all. But he suffered from depression before that."

Dr. Fredric Brandt apparently recognized himself in Dr. Grant [pronounced "Franff"], a fictional character [played by Martin Short] on the popular Netflix TV comedy show �Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.� And the parody helped drive him to despair.

On Sunday morning, Brandt hanged himself in his Miami mansion. The pioneering dermatologist, who kept celebrities like Madonna looking forever young, was 65.

"Did the show upset him? Yes. It was a mean characterization. He was a human being, no one would like that. It was making fun of him for the way he looked and it was mean and it was bullying."

Here's what Martin Short was doing. Is this "mean" and "bullying"?



How will this incident affect Short? Here's an article from last November showing his sensitivity about the death of his wife. She died of ovarian cancer in 2010, and he says "I�m still very much married to Nancy."

"In our thirty-six years together we became so intimately familiar with the workings of each other�s minds that I can convincingly play out the conversations we would be having today, about things that postdate Nancy�s death, -- the continued adventures of our three kids, the arrival of HRH Prince George of Cambridge, the Chris Christie �Bridgegate� scandal, and such curiosities as twerking, Ted Cruz....

"Nancy has only slipped away into the next room. So some night, when I�m really missing her, I�ll grab a rum and Coke at twilight and sit on the couch on our front porch, or perhaps upstairs, on the balcony off of our bedroom, with the Pacific Ocean in view. I�ll call out, 'Hey, Nan!' Forming the words just feels good in the throat."

Or he does something they always did in the car when Nancy would say "Hand of a hand," which was a cue for Martin to put his right hand in her left. "Kiss the hand," he�d say and she would lift it to her lips and kiss it. "I still offer my hand to Nancy � it�s how I initiate our conversations."

ADDED: A plastic surgeon to the stars is a perfect target for mockery, whether he has the character to take a joke or not. The bullying and meanness that is occurring here is toward Martin Short. And as CJinPA said in the comments, there's a big difference between mocking someone for their "natural looks" and mocking them for "looks resulting from deliberate facial manipulation prompted by income-producing vanity." The former is mean, the latter is telling the truth:

[P]eople like Brandt profited from cultural messaging that produce needless insecurities in regular people. His profit motives, like his clients' faces, are grotesque.

"But there's a fundamental problem with the latest Carrie movie and Carrie The Musical..."

"They both try to turn her into a heroine, and her story into one of female empowerment, and it's not."

Carrie does deal with empowerment, but it's something brand new and terrifying...

[T]his is key: Carrie's a victim, and while she may get revenge � on everyone, deserving or not � she never enjoys anything remotely approaching a feminist sense of liberation. She's bullied mercilessly at school and abused at home. The character was a composite of two girls � referred to by the aliases of Tina White and Sandra Irving � King knew during high school, both of whom eventually committed suicide. "There is a goat in every class, the kid who ... stands at the end of the pecking order," King once wrote. "This was Tina. Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day."