WHY SO SERIOUS?
“I WAS TRYING TO BE A PRO-SURFER WHEN I WAS YOUNG, AND THAT WAS ALWAYS VERY SERIOUS,” KIWI SURFER, LUKE CEDERMAN, TELLS TRACKS. “EVERYONE WAS TRYING TO LOOK COOL AND BE COOL AND NO ONE EVER LET THEIR GUARD DOWN. AND SO, I DID THE SAME. BUT IT GOT THE POINT THAT I WAS LIKE; ‘FUCK THIS SHIT.’ WHY ALL THE TESTOSTERONE AND ALL THE GRUMPINESS?”
Cederman responded with his Raglan Surf Report, a series of social media skits and videos that take the piss out of surfing and surfers. It’s that very rare bird in surfing; it’s actually funny.
It had me thinking about surfing’s relationship with comedy; an often fraught and checkered dance, more drunk uncle at a wedding than Fred Astaire (one for the kids!) It led me to write this potted history of comedy and surfing, with the aim of not making it as funny as a turd in the lineup. Fark, this already needs work.
Personally, I came to the investigation with the central tenet that the highpoint of surfing comedy was Bruce Brown’s ‘Endless Summer’.That film was released in 1964, and I feared surfing’s relationship with comedy has been rocky, bordering on severely dysfunctional, ever since.
“Brown masterfully split the difference between his core surfing audience and a hoped-for mainstream audience,” Matt Warshaw, the writer, historian and curator of the Encyclopedia of Surfing, told Tracks. “His definitively Southern California voice is the star of the film. It was casual and easy. Sure, it was corny, but you can hear him grinning.”
Sixty years on, the lines have dated, sure, but they still bring a smile to the dial. In the Australian section, Brown drawls. “When
