The Men of 'Ted' Throw Away the Talking Point(s)

In 2012, the writer and animator Seth MacFarlane, famous at the time as the creator of Family Guy, created something else entirely. Ted was a movie about a degenerate manchild (Mark Wahlberg) and his degenerate talking teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane), rated R, raunchy with sex and drugs. The animation of Ted was creepily real, which made MacFarlane’s hilarious script—frat humor but with smart, biting social commentary—funny in a way that felt new. (In the opening scene, between bong hits Ted mimics a woman having an orgasm with a Boston accent—“hahduh! hahduh!”—adding, post-climax, “That was so great, now I’m gonna stuff my face with fuckin’ Pepperidge Fahhhm.”) Roger Ebert, America’s film critic, loved it. To this day it remains one of the funniest screenplays of the twenty-first century.