Surfing’s Great Humor Drought began in 1968 and lasted eight or so years. Blame drugs. Blame soul surfing. Blame shortboards. Blame Pipeline! The first thing we did after getting our first good long look inside the tube was to decide our fine little sun-kissed sport was “heavy.” Heavy enough, anyway, to crush the fun.

Yes, there were funny people in surfing during the late sixties and seventies. Ian Cairns, Rory Russell, and Buttons. Corky Carroll, before he started making country-folk albums. There were even a few who dared to be funny in surfing’s public sphere. Phil Jarratt was incapable of sitting at a typewriter without loosing off a few zingers. Drew Kampion could do  funny as easily as he could fire off a stanza of earnest Whitmanesque free-verse poetry. 

 "Comedy Annual '74" tickled the ribs nicely.

But for the most part we were up to our dilated pupils in seriousness and high purpose. I’ve seen History Channel documentaries with more chuckles than 

 is bearable only if chased with an equilibrium-restoring shot of Richard Pryor. “Tom Stone, Pipeline,” would have been a perfectly fine cover caption for SURFER’s March issue in 1970, but editors instead went with “Tom Stone suspended in the Pipeline vector complex.”

So thank God for seven-time USSC finalist and surf world court jester Mike Purpus. We may debate his merits as an international-caliber surfer (not a great stylist in my view, but had a mile-wide progressive streak). We may freely mock certain fashion choices he made (Katin trunks laced up high and tight 

 his fullsuit—that look ain't coming back). But let the record show that Mike Purpus did more than anybody to keep humor alive in surfing's Age of Nixon. Pose for 

 wearing nothing but a thick strand of puka shells, a Burt Reynolds mustache, and a schoolboy grin? Yes. Show up at the biggest contest of the year with a full-frontal life-size barely-legal nude girl airbrushed on the bottom of his new board? Excuse me, a full-frontal life-size barely-legal nude girl holding an airbrushed copy of 

 with Mike Purpus on the cover? Yes! When SURFER asked a cross-section of A-listers in 1970 "What do you hope to get out of your surfing experience?" the answers predictably sounded as if they'd been memorized from a lesser CSNY track: "To live peacefully in harmony with nature," "To make life better for me and my brothers." Purpus, just as predictably, ran the other way: "I hope to get a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and five naked lady companions." Best of all, maybe, in Steve Soderberg's "Ocean Fever" Mike took a pie in the face during an on-camera interview. Watch the clip, above. 

Interestingly, this wasn't all fun and games for Purpus. I don't think humor came naturally to him, in fact. I knew Mike in the 1970s, and he wasn't especially funny. My guess is that Humor, for Purpus, was viewed as part of the job of being a professional surfer. He wanted to stand out. The size of whatever meager sponsorship paychecks he was receiving likely depended on it. Serious wave-riding chops and a relentless work ethic put him on the map (Purpus logged more water time than anyone I've ever known), but he rightly figured out that if he could tack hard away from the dominant Gerry Lopez-Nat Young presentation model, which was by turns humble and earnest and philosophical, he could carve out a niche. It worked. At his peak, Purpus got dumped on more often than anybody in the sport. He was booed at surf movies. Flamed in surf magazines' letters column. But he was not ignored. He remained front and center. And he was not without conviction. "People say I have as much soul as a go-ahead," he once wrote. "But I found out long ago that all the soul in the world can't buy me breakfast."

Post-shortboard heaviness was a near-death experience for surfing's sense of humor. Mike Purpus, with his Katins and his Raquel Welch obsession and his ridiculous leather hat, paddle-shocked us back to life. Did we thank him? We gave him a pie in the face. I'll take that as a "yes."

MIKE PURPUS TOOK A PIE IN THE FACE FOR OUR SINS

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