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You might find a more squalid, unpleasant and foul film than Ted 2 to watch this weekend, but it’s unlikely. It’s also highly unlikely that you’ll find a funnier one.

Ted 2

Building on the flimsy but effective premise of the original film — a teddy bear come to life — Ted 2 sees Ted having to prove that he is a person, so that he can be married to Tami-Lynn (Jessica Barth). His old friend John (Mark Wahlberg) helps him recruit a young, inexperienced, bong-smoking lawyer (Amanda Seyfried) to fight his case in court.

So that’s the setup. It’s not just a story, of course — as was the case with the first film, it’s a frame to hang the most appalling selection of utterly filthy gags. Before even the opening, Busby Berkeley-inspired opening credits, you’ll be treated to gay sex jokes, bear sex jokes, drug jokes. It is a very, very funny film.

It’s funny in a very strange and sharp way. Trying to cast speciesism as the new racism, it mentions Dred Scott for comedy value, not something one does lightly and not something many other films would risk. It works — or, at the very least, the film builds up so much comedy goodwill that you’ll be willing to allow it. It also risks a reference to John Candy’s “Do The Mess Around” in Planes, Trains And Automobiles, a film you invoke at your own peril. But, again, it’s a funny enough film that it can get away with this kind of hubris. It really is that funny.

It manages to risk being sweet and sentimental, too, in moments, but not too many, and does immediately redeem itself by returning to the semen gags and erections gags and everything else you’d expect from a film of this calibre. It also features a handful of rather odd cameos from assorted celebrities, not least from Liam Neeson being rather peculiar.

And, this being a Seth MacFarlane film, there are the inevitable jokes about Amanda Seyfried’s eyes. The editing suggests that she didn’t necessarily know they were in the script, but she should, given that MacFarlane almost certainly hired her for this film after getting a bug-eyed monster crack into A Million Ways To Die In The West.

Ted 2 is not a sophisticated film, not a classy picture, not a movie with any meaningfully redeeming features apart from the fact that it is endlessly, relentlessly funny. Paramount laid on pizza, beer and wine at the press screening, perhaps thinking that they’d need to win us over before letting us in, or maybe hoping that we’d only laugh if we were pissed enough. They really needn’t have worried. They opened up three screens at the Events Cinema in Newmarket; I don’t know about screens five and seven, but in six, the audience laughed the whole film through. It really is that funny.