The Raglan Surf Report, Luke Cederman’s surf comedy brain child, just aimed a satirical cannon at pro surfers and the fans who obsess over them. He also got a little help from Jonathan Freeman and Jacob Szekely.
“When a pro surfer loses a sponsor, it’s a tragedy for all of us. We all lose a part of our identity,” says Freeman as he places a candle on a shrine of Italo Ferreira, “Since Italo got dropped from Billabong, it’s been difficult to find what boardshorts to purchase to perfect my 360 alley-oop airs.” The sketch then moves to the POV of the pros themselves, with Szekely saying, “Pro surfers are like the shaman of the surfing world. We guide people through their journey of picking the right wetsuit or boardshorts.”
However, the free-wheeling video then makes a hard pivot to parodying the self-important bravado of pros in general, with lines like “You know, a lot of people come up to me and say ‘Do you really need to catch every wave out there?’ Yes, yes I do, because that’s my job.”
There seems to be two conflicting jokes at play here. One is about the amateur surfers’ reliance on pros’ sponsorships to tell them what to consume and the pros’ complicity in this. The other is more generally about pros being self-important dicks in the real world. They’re both valid subjects of parody, but don’t ever quite seem to mesh together into one cohesive whole. On the other hand, watching Cederman shoo away Freeman and call him an “un-sponsored peasant” is hilarious.
