The Problematics: The Foul-Mouthed ‘Ted’ Always Aimed To Offend, And 10 Years Later, You Can’t Say It Didn’t Succeed

When being offensive is a movie’s point, or at least a most prominent part of is point, what is the point of pointing out the movie’s problematic content? As we mark the 10th anniversary of the release of the Seth McFarlane comedy Ted, it’s a question we’re obliged to ponder.

Ten years being not such a long time ago, I can handily refer to my own contemporary review of Ted. While I had never been particularly high on McFarlane’s series Family Guy (my impression of its humor roughly corresponded to the take Parker and Stone offered in the South Park episode “Cartoon Wars Part II” ), I went into the movie with an open mind and was rewarded riotously. I laughed very hard, particularly at one joke in the supermarket checkout position job interview in which the foul-mouthed talking teddy bear of the title impugns the wife of the supermarket manager.

Does the joke hold up? Well, this time around I did not laugh for a full twenty minutes, as I claimed in my review (which was on the MSN website, which got scrubbed of my work long ago, but I don’t take it personally) but I still laughed.

McFarlane’s fractured fairy tale gets off to a very credible start as these things go. Music of Spielbergian wonder (composed by Walter Murphy, who does the music for Family Guy and is, yes, the same guy who did that “Fifth of Beethoven” business) and shots of semi-pastoral streets and stentorian narration from Sir Patrick Stewart, speaking of Christmas, the blessed time of year “when Boston children gather together and beat up the Jewish kids.” The movie is definitely replete with jokes precision-engineered to elicit “that’s not funny” reactions from not-insubstantial numbers of individuals. One thing that McFarlane does have in common with Parker and Stone is a kind of smirky insouciance, a who-cares-if-you’re-offended attitude. (Although it’s worth noting that recently Parker and Stone have sanded some of the rougher edges off their Broadway hit The Book of Mormon.)

When the jokes are coming fast and landing hard, that’s easy to ignore, or forgive, as the case may be. McFarlane’s ridiculous scenario of a teddy bear coming to life doesn’t hew to the standard talking-animal comedy in that the power of speech is kept secret from the outside world. (See the Francis the Talking Mule films or the sitcom Mr. Ed, both created by the same guy, who used real animals, and real animal abuse, to simulate the talking.) Everyone knows Ted can talk, and so he becomes a celebrity, and by the time his boy, Johnny, played by a still surprisingly game Mark Wahlberg, is all grown up, Ted is a burned-out celebrity. So when we’re introduced to adult Ted (a very convincing animated bear, voiced and motion-captured by McFarlane), doing bong hits with Johnny on the couch while asking questions like “You ever hear a Boston girl have an orgasm?” you’re ready, one supposes, for the barrage.

The subsequent outrageousness involve humor that at least skirts homophobia. And also reveals McFarlane’s ultimately conventional sensibility, as when he depicts Ted and Johnny enjoying the 1980 sci-fi goof fest Flash Gordon with Johnny exclaiming “So bad…but so good.” Except Flash Gordon is not EVEN bad. But that’s an argument for another time.

We know that we’re not supposed to take the foul-mouthed bear’s japes all that seriously because they’re largely inapposite. When Johnny’s live-in girlfriend Lori comes home announcing turkey burgers for dinner, Ted asks “are we having homosexuals over for dinner tonight?” We all know the gay community is hardly enamored with turkey burgers. And so on. So when Ted moves into his own apartment (because, you know, his presence is a strain on Johnny and Lori’s relationship) and tells Johnny that “there’s an Asian family living next door” but he doesn’t mind because they don’t have a gong or anything, one shrugs.

McFarlane actually expands on the joke in a wild party sequence featuring Flash Gordon star Sam Jones playing a coked-up version of himself (wonder what that casting negotiation was like) and picking a fight with the male Asian neighbor, whose name happens to be, wait for it, “Ming.” Hoo boy. Ted himself battles the duck that Ming was about to cook. Ming, played by Robert Wu, talks a bit like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. One can’t say that the bit spoils the movie — I mean, all things considered, would it? — but one can note it’s mercifully short.

The movie loses steam after this scene, partially because it’s obliged to start paying more attention to its narrative — the inevitable rom-com reconciliation, Ted’s foreshadowed kidnapping, all that. The Ted and Johnny knock-down-drag-out is more technologically impressive than hilarious. (The excellent animation of Ted was done by Phil Tippett’s studio, and if you’ve followed Tippett’s career at all, you have some idea that he likes to get a little twisted.) It is also amusing to see Norah Jones show off her salty side, and of course the also long-foreshadowed and hence inevitable Tom Skerritt cameo awaits. The biggest laugh line in this section is Ted telling his creepy-boy co-kidnapper, “That’s a great story I felt like I was there.”

The thing about Ted as a potential problematic is that it does draw lines that it won’t cross. One of the events that precipitates the breakup of Johnny and Lori is Ted’s hooker party at their apartment while the couple are on an evening out. Johnny and Lori come back early, and after they get over the initial shock of four garishly-dressed women on the couch, Lori nearly gags at a discovery. “There is a shit on my floor,” she gasps. And sure enough there is. But McFarlane and cinematographer Michael Barrett present the offending bowel movement (the product, Ted says, of a particularly spirited round of Truth or Dare) as an out-of-focus lump. Compare and contrast, if you will, with the 1972 John Waters classic Pink Flamingos, a relentlessly scabrous parade of bits centered around fecal matter and anal peculiarities shot in the sharpest resolution Waters’ crude equipment could muster. (A film just issued on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection, I might add!) Not to put a food metaphor in a paragraph where one least wants a food metaphor, but McFarlane knows, with respect to Hollywood, which side his bread is buttered on.

But in the meantime, there’s much to enjoy. The line “stick your finger in the loop of my tag” makes no sense on its own, but in context it’s a stitch. The line “you better never show your face around Quincey” need no explanation, or at least should not. And speaking of Hollywood, I reckon this movie marks the very last time the definitively offensive phrase “fucking retarded” (here pronounced “retahded”) is heard in a mainstream studio picture.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.