All the way back in 2012, a year before he sang a song called We Saw Your Boobs at all the female actors in attendance at the Oscars, Family Guy showrunner Seth MacFarlane released a movie called Ted. The story of a sentient, foul-mouthed teddy bear, Ted was essentially the Barbie of its day, being both commercially successful (it made more than half a billion dollars) and critically lauded (the Guardian voted it as the second best movie of 2012, sandwiched between Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Haneke).
Three years later MacFarlane made a sequel, Ted 2, which was not nearly as successful. However, this was not the end of Ted. This year, the inevitable happened and Ted became a TV series. Ostensibly a prequel to the movies, the Ted TV show revolves around the same sentient, foul-mouthed bear, only younger and at school. In one episode, Ted smokes pot. In another, Ted gets drunk. In another, Ted tries to help a teenage boy lose his virginity. One episode is called Ejectile Dysfunction. It is the sort of television series you will either love or absolutely hate – and without the outwardly innocent little bear at its centre, chances are most people would hate it.
Getting something cute and inanimate to say terrible things is one of the oldest tricks in the book – since the 1890s, in fact, when ventriloquist Fred Russell sat a wooden doll on his knee and made it say a variety of vaguely impolite phrases. Russell ended up working well into his 90s, billing himself as the World’s Oldest Ventriloquist, because he happened to tap into a fundamental truth: we are much more forgiving of puppets than we are of people.
A puppet can act as a depository for all your worst thoughts. Key to Russell’s appeal, and the appeal of every ventriloquist – or everyone who has filtered their opinions through any sort of inanimate object – since, was that he wasn’t the one being outrageous. He was just the guy trying to keep things together. With a puppet, you can say the most vile things, so long as you’re prepared to gasp and chastise it afterwards. You can forgive a performer for all sorts of terrible things if they make a puppet say them. My leading theory of the moment is that people would like Ricky Gervais an awful lot more if he had a puppet show.
Stick a pin anywhere in popular culture and you’ll find a variation of the form. Chucky, the protagonist of the Child’s Play films, has become an icon of horror thanks to the gap between how he looks (a sweet, unassuming doll) and how he acts (murdering lots of people while gurgling like a sailor with pneumonia). Triumph the Insult Comic Dog made his name by being extremely rude to people on American talkshows, despite being a deeply unconvincing puppet. Take away Emu, and Rod Hull was essentially just a man who went on television and strangled people with his bare hands. Team America: World Police gained its notoriety by taking some marionette puppets and forcing them to vomit and have sex.
Clearly, Team America also used its puppets as a Trojan horse for a number of slightly higher-minded issues, from the heavy-handedness of post-9/11 American foreign policy to the flaccidity of Hollywood liberalism. The film was already fairly hectoring, but if it had been made with people and not puppets, there’s a chance that it would have been unbearable. The same goes for the stage musical Avenue Q, which is such a carnival of brightly coloured puppetry that you don’t realise that you’ve actually been subjected to an eat-your-vegetables lecture until you’re halfway home.
Jeff Dunham, one of the highest-earning comedians in the US, made his name by being appalling with puppets. The characters he hauls out of suitcases include Walter (an old man who “says whatever we’re afraid to say”) and Achmed (“the world’s only beloved dead terrorist”). Both routinely make cruel, punching-down jokes, but both get away with it because they’re puppets. Similarly, the wonderful old MTV2 show Wonder Showzen routinely featured a segment where a Sesame Street-style puppet named Clarence would aggressively harass members of the public. The incredible thing was that whenever the victims had had enough, they would always get angry at the puppet and not at the person operating him.
This isn’t something that will go away any time soon. Later this year Channel 4 will unveil something called The Really Really Rude Puppet Show, in which celebrities will read internet fan fiction about themselves, while their stories are re-enacted by a band of puppets. And this makes sense, because it’s a lot more palatable to watch relentlessly upsetting sex scenes being performed by puppets than by real people.
As long as inanimate objects can get away with more than humans, this sort of thing is bound to continue. In fact, if the Ted TV series doesn’t turn out to be a hit, that might be because of how relatively tame it is. Drinking and pot-smoking don’t exactly push boundaries in 2024. Hopefully it isn’t too late to turn things around by having Ted join a demonic murder cult or whatever.
• Ted will air on Sky Max and Now from 9 February
