Mark Wahlberg, Will Ferrell, Eva Mendes take on fanboys for ‘Other Guys’

Audience questions at Comic-Con are a lot like live grenades.

Breathless fans, often clad in outlandish homemade costumes, take turns lobbing their queries at the stars on stage. Most respond with some variation of ducking and weaving, while putting on Oscar-worthy performances to appear gracious and humble.

Sometimes, however, the stars just can’t help themselves. During a panel to promote Sony Picture’s action comedy “The Other Guys,” actors Will Ferrell, Eva Mendes and Mark Wahlberg began lobbing the grenades back at the audience, which in turn exploded with non-stop laughter.

In the movie, due out Aug. 6, Ferrell and Wahlberg play two bumbling cops who uncover a massive corporate conspiracy. But at the Comic-Con panel Friday afternoon, all they uncovered was one joke after another.

It began with a bespectacled teenager who struggled to get his question out. Before he found his vocal chords, Mendes purred, “You’re cute.” As he turned visibly red, she asked, “Are you legal?” Sensing an opportunity, Wahlberg pounced on the flustered 16-year-old. “Go ahead. You want to ask how she smells,” Wahlberg said, beckoning at Mendes. “She smells as good as she looks.”

When an audience member asked Ferrell if he had a hidden talent. Wahlberg interjected, “Tell her about your tongue wrestling skills.”

Another question targeted Wahlberg, who was asked if it was true that he spoke Hebrew. He answered by spewing out some choice Hebrew phrases. Ferrell asked the questioner to translate, and she replied, “He said you were a [expletive].”

One teenager asked Mendes if she remembered him. He began recounting an occurrence several years earlier when he called her “foxy.” She had given him a hug at the time and said, “You’re a little young. Come back in five years.”

Mendes, as it turned out, did remember.

“You were so cute. You were a little boy,” she said and then added with a come-hither, low growl, “And now you’re not.”

Ferrell, casting a proprietary glance at Mendes who plays his wife in the movie, pretended to look offended that other guys would be after her.

“I’ll fight him,” Ferrell said, throwing mock hostile looks at the youth. “I don’t care. I’ll fight anyone in the audience!”

And so he did, winning them over with humor.