This follow up to the 2012 smash (US$50 million production budget with a US$550 million B.O. return) didn’t exactly have me frothing with anticipation. When Mark Wahlberg made a joke about Ted 3 in the recent Entourage movie that he’d make “20 if I can”, I wasn’t sure where they would take this second instalment of the cute as buttons bear that comes to life as a crude pot smoking companion to Mark Wahlberg’s lonely guy John Bennett.

Turns out they take him on the road in the most heterosexual, possibly homophobic, declaration of support for gay marriage you’re likely to see in cinemas this month.

It’s a year on from Ted(Writer/Director Seth MacFarlane)’s wedding to check-out chick Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth) and things are no longer in the Honeymoon phase.

They argue and throw things and John(Wahlberg) advises them to have a kid so they can focus their energy on raising a child instead of always fighting. Ouch! That’s advice that sadly too many people in the real world heed.

One problem – Ted is not equipped with the necessary body parts required to reproduce with Tami-Lynn, and their subsequent exploration of alternative options result not just in hilarious scenes like John getting covered in semen samples, but in a red flag being raised in regards to the status of Ted who has previously flown under the radar with authorities re his identity.

He loses his job, his bank account, his pizza club membership and before long is stripped of his assumed identity of a normal person.

John and Ted hire a lawyer, but being the broke kind of guys they are, the task of tackling a civil rights case falls to fresh out of Law School Samantha (Amanda Seyfried) who not only smokes bongs, but also manages to take the case further than expected all the while ramping up the sexual tension between herself and John… There’s also priceless jokes about her appearance and lack of knowledge of basic pop culture facts.

When she retorts that she bets the guys don’t know who wrote The Great Gatsby, MacFarlane and Wahlberg turn that exchange into gold.

Alongside the ample blue collar, pop culture gear, there’s plenty of pot related comedy too, and its all mainly stupid fun, with the one serious theme that when civil rights are being fought for, it doesn’t task too many years before society looks back in disbelief that certain portions of the population had to fight for them in the first place.

It’s almost as if Seth and his buddies were sitting around getting high when somebody suggested making a movie with a plot along the lines of the Beastie Boys classic “Fight for your Right (to Party)”…

The gang find themselves in New York tracking down civil rights lawyer Patrick Meighan (Morgan Freeman) while simultaneously running amok at the city’s Comic Con, in a dual plot line that sees the original manufacturer of Ted, toy behemoth Hasbro, implicated in a shady plan to kidnap the talking teddy-bear to discover what makes him tick so they can build millions more of him.

It’s here at Comic Con that the funniest and most poignant scenes unfold, showcasing MacFarlane’s trainspotting obsession with toys, comics, Star Wars and every other ingredient that made Robot Chicken so enjoyable for kids of the 70’s, 80’s & 90’s.

If you like Robot Chicken and gross out comedy then you’ll be in heaven.

Ted 2 would make an interesting first date night flick, as you’d get a real sense of what your partner might tolerate, one way or the other.

I watched with my 14 year old son, both of us Robot Chicken devotees, and we “bearly” stopped laughing.

The mostly full cinema was mostly full of laughter too.

Brilliantly Stupid and Stupidly Brilliant.  3 & 1/2 Stars.