Sequels to comedies tend to be superfluous. Did we really need a follow-up to “Airplane!”? Or “The Hangover”? Or “The Phantom Menace”? “Ted 2” was also unnecessary, and the movie’s as much of a mess as the scene in which the boys extravagantly mismanage an encounter with a rack of sperm donations.
Yet “Ted 2” has so many moments of crazy brilliance that I laughed a lot, if infrequently. Is a ballplayer who whiffs four times but hits the ball 500 feet on his fifth try worth watching? I say yes.
Ted, now married to Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) — while best friend John (Mark Wahlberg) has gotten divorced — wants to have a baby to make her happy. But despite his fondness for porn (at his bachelor party, he watches grizzlies mate), Ted can’t produce a cub. His quest for fatherhood brings the full force of state scrutiny on him: He is ruled a nonperson, loses his job and even has his Papa John’s loyalty card revoked. Needing a lawyer, he hires a rookie (Amanda Seyfried) so young, he worries that she might sing “Frozen” songs in her opening arguments.
If the first film’s fantasy-celebrity nexus was a collision of “E.T.” the movie and “ET” the gossip show, the second approaches civil rights from the general direction of Kafka. Ted, at trial, must prove he is a person, not property. Surely anyone who can tell weed jokes is human? Like Kafka’s Joseph K., Ted lacks a last name, though, unlike Joseph, Ted chooses one: Clubberlang. It’s the Mr. T character from “Rocky III.”
Writer-director Seth MacFarlane, who again performs the voice of the foulmouthed teddy bear, has a cluttered and interesting mind. He has created an existential d - - k joke of a movie, one that ruminates on Thomas Jefferson, Dred Scott and the 13th Amendment in the course of presenting a penis-shaped bong, an attempted burglary of Tom Brady’s manly essence, and an investigative report on Jay Leno’s men’s room perversions.
The sweetness of the first film, though, has been displaced by arrogance: This is a director’s cut of a movie, with four musical interludes, a long road trip, and many failed attempts to revive the Flash Gordon gags from “Ted.” MacFarlane can leave no joke behind. If he had cut out the worst 30 minutes, “Ted 2” might have been great.
Still, by this point, MacFarlane is like that attractively errant friend you have to keep up with. It’s as if he has every comedy channel going at the same time. He loves a joke about shaking up a beer the way he loves old-school musicals and absurdism (among the forest animals gathered to hear a lovely ballad are a raccoon, a fox and a lobster). There’s sharp dialogue (“We don’t know any lawyers. All our friends make sandwiches”), insult comedy (the comparison of Seyfried to a famous movie villain is brilliant) and a parody of ’80s movie montages. Then there are forays into the nihilistic and the dark: MacFarlane is a guy who was almost killed on 9/11 who makes 9/11 jokes. There’s a Robin Williams reference, too.
MacFarlane isn’t an intellectual, but he isn’t just a gross-out comic, either. Like 1970s Woody Allen, he is attuned to thanatos as well as eros; he may not read books, but he’s heard of many of them. Really he’s a song-and-dance man who takes the measure of the void, the missing link between Sammy Davis Jr. and Samuel Beckett.