Ted

There are moments in Seth MacFarlane's new comedy Ted so flagrantly vulgar -- bits involving parsnips and hand lotion and human excrement (though thankfully not all together) -- that you are inevitably reminded of John Waters, the maestro of bad taste who held up a fun-house mirror to America in the 1970s and '80s, in movies like Pink Flamingos and Polyester, showing us that we are not nearly so upstanding as we would like to pretend.

But then you remember that Waters never came up with anything like the title character in Ted, a pot-smoking, four-letter-word spewing, anthropomorphic teddy bear who also happens to have a mean right hook. Ted is a symphony of the crass. Pity the pour soul who wanders into this movie unawares. (At the end of the screening I attended, I saw two women wearing expressions of relieved terror -- like they had just survived a carjacking.) Everyone else, though, gets to relish the most sustained, deliciously weird assault on middle-class American values since the original Jackass.