Ted Forth is a character in the syndicated comic strip

Comic strip

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....

 Sally Forth

Sally Forth (syndicated strip)

Sally Forth is a daily comic strip created by Greg Howard in 1982, focusing on the life of a white American middle-class mother at home and work. Sally's name is a play on words—"to sally forth" means to set out on an adventure....

. Ted is a perpetually forty-year-old white-collar professional working in strategic sourcing

Strategic sourcing

Strategic sourcing is an institutional procurement process that continuously improves and re-evaluates the purchasing activities of a company. In a production environment, it is often considered one component of supply chain management...

. Ted was unemployed from the middle of May 2007 to May 2008.

People find Ted to be a refreshing and realistic portrait of modern fatherhood.

Plot sequences and running gags involving Ted include:

• He has an obsession with 1980s pop culture trivia
  Trivia
  The trivia are the three lower Artes Liberales, i.e. grammar, rhetoric and logic. These were the topics of basic education, foundational to the quadrivia of higher education, and hence the material of basic education, of interest only to undergraduates...
  
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• For a long while neither his ten-year-old daughter Hilary nor the reader knew Ted's profession. Ted's job, strategic sourcing, was finally mentioned in the strip published on March 8, 2008.
• He becomes highly competitive while coaching girls' softball
  Softball
  Softball is a bat-and-ball sport played between two teams of 10 to 14 players. It is a direct descendant of baseball although there are some key differences: softballs are larger than baseballs, and the pitches are thrown underhand rather than overhand...
  
  . Due to the continuous losing by the team's poor performance is leading Ted onto signs of a mental breakdown.
• He despises his mother-in-law, who insults his masculinity
  Masculinity
  Masculinity is possessing qualities or characteristics considered typical of or appropriate to a man. The term can be used to describe any human, animal or object that has the quality of being masculine...
  
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• His favorite food is meatloaf
  Meatloaf
  Meatloaf is a dish of ground meat formed into a loaf shape and baked or smoked. The loaf shape is formed by either cooking it in a loaf pan, or forming it by hand on a flat baking pan...
  
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• He is actually a member of "la famiglia."