"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.

Martin Short devastates a doctor.

"Cosmetic dermatologist Fredric Brandt - who was recently rumored to be the inspiration behind a character on the Netflix show Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt � died on Sunday, aged 65...."

The Dr Franff character is depicted on the Netflix show with a high-pitched laugh and unable to speak certain words due to his plastic surgery. He is also seen drinking from a surgical bag and reinflates his own face after being punched.

"In recent years, a new Korean word, sung-gui, began to surface online. It means 'plastic-surgery monster.'"

It's "a person who has had so much cosmetic alteration that he or she 'looks unnatural and arouses repulsion,'" writes Patricia Marx in an excellent New Yorker article about the extreme popularity of plastic surgery in South Korea. Supposedly, "a third of all plastic-surgery patients were dissatisfied with the results," and there was a reality TV show called "Back to My Face":

I met with Siwon Paek, the producer of the show�s pilot. In the pilot, contestants who had had at least ten surgeries compete to win a final operation that promises to undo all the previous reconstructions. Paek emphasized that the aim is to help plastic-surgery addicts come to terms psychologically with their appearance. Those with lower incomes, she said, tend to be the most compulsive about plastic surgery. �They feel they have no other way to prove themselves to people and lift themselves socially and economically,� she said. Although the �Back to My Face� pilot was popular, Paek said that she will produce no more episodes. �I didn�t have the strength to continue,� she told me. The responsibility of changing people�s lives weighed too heavily on her, she said, and finding contestants was hard. �For one month, I stood outside a dance club,� she told me. �I solicited two hundred people. Most didn�t want to go back to the way they looked before.�

"And I said, 'Look, I need to look my age!' He said... 'You need a little soft, double chin."

"'A soft little pillow, a little cushion under your chin.' And do you know what he did? I saw him delving in a sort of white box, a freezer. And he pulled out a little shrink-wrapped package. It looked like a chicken breast. And he said, 'We'll stitch this on. And it will settle in. And it will give you a lovely double chin.' And I said, 'What is that?' He said, 'What? More like what was it, Edna ... That was Elizabeth Taylor's left love handle.' Elizabeth Taylor's love handle is now my soft, little chin. And if you look at it very closely, you can see some indentations where Richard Burton's fingers held. ... Isn't it beautiful? It's history in my face. History."

Said Dame Edna.

"Nor did the researchers find any convincing correlation between a man�s foot size..."

"... and the length of his manhood."

(What about nose size? If they found a convincing correlation, people wouldn't get so many nose jobs... or maybe there would be nose enlargements, like breast enlargements.)