Baring Ted's Ethnic Humor

Why does the summer's comic hit movie, "Ted" need to begin with a mock act of anti-Semitic violence?

Movie promos and reviews had already prepared me for the titled characters: a foul mouthed, pot-smoking come-to-life teddy bear and his thirty-five year old never-gonna-grow-up owner. But the film's narrated opening Christmas eve scene, nostalgically referring to the holiday as that special time when "children gather together and beat up the Jewish kids," that is voiced over a group of boys chasing, catching, pummeling and bloodying a young Jewish boy, caught me off guard.

I get it: the film's main character John (Mark Wahlberg) is so unpopular he even feels the Jewish kid is better liked than him. What I question (at the risk at being called out as a comedy curmudgeon) is whether using the Jewish kid, literally as a punch line is funny.

They say that nothing is very funny if it needs to be explained, and, oy, does this scene need explanation. In it, Seth McFarlane, (Of "Family Guy" fame) the writer and director of the film, as well as the voice of the sexually charged stuffed animal, is attempting to place the circa 1985 suburban Boston setting in which John grew up. Instead, MacFarlane exposes an even older stereotypical comic neighborhood--the one in which he apparently resides.

The ethnic humor here is not about "big noses" anymore, but it still relies on, despite a Jewish American history of serving in the armed forces, on U.S. Olympics teams, or even playing in the NFL, the stereotype of the nebbishy Jewish boy for a worn-out laugh.

Jews, even at this date, around one hundred years after the ethnic stereotypes of the vaudevillian stage, unfortunately continue to occupy that uncomfortable place in American pop culture where some Americans continue to see us as the "other," and readily exploitable for comic effect.

Here, the scene serves as an introduction to the movie's no-holds-barred comedic point of view. But to make the same point, couldn't MacFarlane have shown the gang beating up on someone else?  Say, the neighborhood's disabled kid? Or overweight, gay, or Muslim kid? (Or perhaps the neighborhood kid who likes to draw cartoons?) But if that, rightly so, remains beyond the comedic pale, why is beating up on the Jewish kid within it? It certainly got a big laugh in the downtown L.A. theater where I saw the film.

As an equal opportunity offender, Jews aren't MacFarlane's only comedic target. In the heavily Latino audience with whom I saw Ted, what was supposed to be a comedic crack about Mexicans was met with silence.

Also, in his successful animated show, "Family Guy," just about every ethnic group, including Jews, gets the gloves off treatment.

In one episode that aired in 2002, "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein," the show's main character, Peter, whose life is in financial ruin, comes to the cartoon logic conclusion that he needs to find "A Jewish guy to handle my money."

As in "Ted," it's an easy laugh, not only playing with the heads of those who believe this kind of stuff, but as in the film, putting a myth about Jews in play for a new generation.

What would I like to see instead? Considering that Jews have a history with talking animals that predates film, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, and the ass in the story of Balaam, quite a bit.
How about a remake in which the talking teddy chides not only the main character to grow up and take responsibility, but the writer of the tale as well.

Perhaps not as funny as the oirginal, but it would be fresh.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."