For the last 15 years or so, Seth MacFarlane has taken great joy in offending everyone and everything, dismissing criticism about his crude humour by claiming to be an “equal-opportunity offender”.
It’s worked out fine on TV, especially in cartoon form — his show Family Guy, which regularly makes headlines for outraging people with vile jokes, is still going strong on Fox after 13 seasons. Its spin-off, The Cleveland Show, lasted four years, while American Dad! lives on at TBS. This autumn, MacFarlane adds another animated series to his repertoire with Fox’s Bordertown, which centres on a Mexican immigrant family and a border patrol officer.
But in non-cartoon life? MacFarlane’s offensiveness has been met with increasing dismay. The backlash revved up with his ill-fated Oscar host stint in 2013, which the New Yorker dubbed a “hostile, ugly, sexist night,” as MacFarlane made his typical race and religion jokes, along with a song about actresses in nude scenes called We Saw Your Boobs. His live-action movie A Million Ways to Die in the West was largely considered a flop last year. And now, there are some fairly brutal reviews for Ted 2.
The first Ted movie in 2012 (starring Mark Wahlberg and his talking stuffed bear, voiced by MacFarlane) was a smash hit, grossing $218 million (Dh800 million) at the box office in the US and is still the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all time. So it was a no-brainer that the studio ordered a sequel. But it’s clear from several scathing reviews that while MacFarlane fans will definitely find it hilarious, in general, his whole “let’s make fun of everyone” bit is living on borrowed time.
“MacFarlane ... isn’t sophisticated or honest enough to unpack his sexual and racial fantasies and hangups. He just spews them,” Wesley Morris wrote at Grantland.
“Ted 2 is the equivalent of a middle-school bully. It’s not as funny as it thinks it is. Its penchant for casual cruelty masks a hollow soul,” said Jacob Hall at the New York Daily News.
“As he proved with his misbegotten A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane is essentially a guy who’s gotten appallingly lucky on television. He exhibits zero proficiency in cinematic staging and no sense of pace. The coarseness and monotony of politically incorrect jokes wear the viewer down,” said Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday.
“The ‘offensive’ jokes that pop up every once in a while in Ted 2 aren’t social satire, or good gags, or even particularly vicious — they’re a gimmick, taunting, trollery,” writes Jason Bailey at Flavorwire.
Indeed, MacFarlane knows how much the critics despise him, and right now, he appears to just be trolling everyone. Many picked up on that not-so-subtle behaviour: “There’s a scene in Ted 2 that so perfectly encapsulates what people detest about Seth MacFarlane that you’d swear he stuck it in there just to mess with the haters,” said A.A. Dowd at The A.V. Club.
The scene in question involves 9/11 and Bill Cosby references, but it’s nothing compared to another much-talked about scene, where Wahlberg winds up covered in sperm when he goes to visit a fertility clinic. MacFarlane brought that up himself when TV critics granted him with the Genius Award at the Critics’ Choice Awards last month. “You can take this back after you’ve seen Ted 2 and Mark Wahlberg gets sperm in his eyes,” MacFarlane joked during his acceptance speech.
But that’s the danger of becoming part of the really gross joke: Being disgusting just for the sake of being disgusting is never a good plan. While that’s been MacFarlane’s business model for a while, that’s not really sustainable.
Especially for someone like MacFarlane, who has showed signs of wanting to take more serious turns with his work: Executive producing the remake of Cosmos, for example. Trolling the critics would seem to indicate he’s out of ideas on the gross-out front — and it could be time to move on to a different schtick before even his most loyal fans grow weary of this one.
