After Seth MacFarlane’s directorial debut A Million Ways to Die in the West, a spoof of westerns pointing out just how bleak and unromantic life in the Old West would’ve been.
While A Million Ways to Die in the West was nowhere near the critical or box office hit that Ted was, MacFarlane’s riff on the Wild West still has plenty of his signature laugh-out-loud moments.
“The American West Is A Disgusting, Awful, Dirty, Dangerous Place.” - Albert
There’s a brilliant monologue in A Million Ways to Die in the West in which sheep farmer Albert Stark, played by MacFarlane himself, explains the central joke upon which the movie is based. Western movies romanticize life on the frontier, but in reality, it was a bleak, miserable, lawless era.
As Albert points out, “Everything out here that’s not you wants to kill you. Angry drunk people, hungry animals, outlaws... the f*cking doctor!”
“Hey, Dude, You Really Shouldn’t Drink And Horse.” - Edward
After a lengthy drinking session at the saloon, Albert drunkenly mounts his horse. His friend Edward, played by Giovanni Ribisi, warns him not to “drink and horse,” but he disregards the advice.
MacFarlane plays the physicality of this bit hilariously as he slumps over on his saddle and hangs half-asleep at a 90-degree angle for the majority of the ride. It’s paid off hysterically when he gets home, tries to dismount, and flops down on the ground as his foot gets stuck in a stirrup.
“Take Your Hat Off, Boy, That’s A Dollar!” - Cowboy
Before he runs afoul of gunslinger Clinch Leatherwood, Albert’s closest rival is Foy, the smarmy, mustachioed character played by Neil Patrick Harris that Albert’s girlfriend leaves him for. Harris quotes his How I Met Your Mother character when Albert challenges him to a shooting match at the fair: “Challenge accepted.”
When Foy wagers a dollar in the shooting match, a cowboy is deemed disrespectful and called out for not taking off his hat to honor the presence of a dollar. Back then, a dollar was worth a lot more.
“There Is Something About Connecting Over Mutual Hatred That Is Just So Much Deeper Than Mutual Love.” - Anna
The love story in A Million Ways to Die in the West sees an outlaw’s wife, Anna, played by Charlize Theron, falling for Albert. Their relationship is kickstarted when they realize they hate all the same things about life in the West.
Anna makes the sharp, somewhat true observation that mutual hatred for something brings people together a lot more quickly and readily than a mutual love of something.
“When I Went To Pick It Up, Somehow It Had Made 20 Dollars.” - Albert
When Anna tells Albert that he’s “a good sheep farmer,” he proclaims, “Oh, please! I suck at sheep.” As his ex pointed out, he’s unable to keep track of his sheep, which is the one thing a sheep farmer has to do.
He explains to Anna that one of his sheep wandered into a brothel and, “When I went to pick it up, somehow it had made 20 dollars.” That’s quite a lot of money, adjusted for inflation.
“I’m So F**king Rich, I Can Have All The Licorice I Want!” - Abraham Lincoln Impersonator
Albert has a mind-bending drug trip when he accidentally ingests a psychedelic substance and it takes him on a trip down memory lane. There’s a hilarious flashback to Albert’s school days when President Abraham Lincoln supposedly paid a visit to his class.
A cameoing Gilbert Gottfried comes out, dressed as Lincoln, and yells at the kids, “Hiya, schmucks! Four score and seven years ago, I was broke!” At the end of his speech, he instantly asks for his speaking fee. With pitch-perfect deadpan timing, Albert says, “I don’t think that’s the real President Lincoln.”
“Great Scott!” - Doc Brown
One of the funniest non-sequitur moments in A Million Ways to Die in the West is Christopher Lloyd’s cameo appearance as Doc Brown. Albert stumbles across Doc’s Old West-era experiments with the DeLorean from Back to the Future Part III.
A baffled Albert takes a peek under the sheet at the time machine and asks, “What’s that?” Quoting Robert Zemeckis’ classic time-travel trilogy, Doc tells him, “It’s a weather experiment!”
“Please Don’t Shoot Us On Sex Night.” - Edward
All throughout the movie, Edward and Ruth are waiting for the right time to consummate their relationship. The night they decide to do it happens to be the night that Clinch comes to town looking for the sheep farmer that his wife has fallen in love with.
He bursts into the room, gun drawn, searching for Albert, and Edward pleads with the notorious gunslinger not to “shoot us on sex night,” suggesting he’d be fine with Clinch coming back the following night and killing them then instead.
“Did He Hear All That Smart Stuff I Did?” - Albert
Following the climactic shootout, Albert unravels his cunning plan to kill Clinch with a venom-laced bullet in a long, unwieldy monologue before it’s revealed that the venom killed his opponent before he heard about “all that smart stuff” he did.
While Albert is rambling on about his genius like Poirot wrapping up a murder mystery, Ruth, played dryly by Sarah Silverman, interrupts his verbose explanation to bluntly tell him, “Albert! He’s dead. You did it.”
“People Die At The Fair.” - Django
As the town’s fair approaches, Albert tells Anna that the fair is notorious for deaths. “People die at the fair” becomes a repeated line as people keep getting killed by freak accidents and deadly shootouts at the fair. For example, a photographer is killed by an exploding camera.
In the movie’s credits scene, Jamie Foxx cameos as Django Unchained. He shoots one of the vendors at the fair and bluntly quips, “People die at the fair,” with the same sharp comic timing that Foxx brought to Django’s own quips, like “I count two guns,” and “I like the way you die, boy.”
