It may be offseason in Vail, but comedians Chad Kroeger and JT Parr were on last week.
Kroeger and Parr dropped in on the Vail Town Council's evening “sesh,” to borrow a term from their signature vernacular, proposing a GoPros-for-all initiative ahead of the June 5-8 GoPro Mountain Games event.
The comedians and hosts of the podcast “Chad and JT Go Deep” were en route from California to Madison, Wisconsin, where they were scheduled to perform late last week.
Known for their love of parties, extreme sports and unorthodox community engagement, the duo has been featured by Howard Stern, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Myers in recent years, but are best known for their out-of-the-box proposals to various Southern California city councils.
Their most popular ideas include public-access yachts, replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Santana, and a campaign to “protect our boarders” and cut down on “skater discriminaysh” (their word/spelling) by coating the entire city of Thousand Oaks in marble.
The duo’s Vail appearance was consistent with their comedic brand, which has created many viral moments since they first started exercising their rights to speak at public comment sessions in 2017, beginning each speech with the line, “what up council” and occasionally ending in a song from Parr.
Their first viral moment together came after protesting the Los Angeles City Council’s crackdown on parties in the Hollywood Hills, and even in that early appearance, their connection to ski towns was apparent, with Kroeger mentioning Lake Tahoe in his speech.
A couple of years later, Kroeger posted a video of himself waking up to a “terrible realizaysh ... chairlifts are not green.” He then posted a video of himself skinning up a mountain while cursing out enemy lifts, calling them “frickin’ gas guzzlers.”
In early 2024, Kroeger and Parr hosted a call-in show in which one listener, who said he had been a snowboarder since he was “shredding the placenta in the womb,” was devastated to learn that Kroeger was a skier and not a snowboarder. It became part of the show’s lore and was referenced by Kroeger in Vail on Tuesday.
Here’s the transcript of Kroeger and Parr’s speeches to the Vail Town Council:
Kroeger: “What up council, my name is Chad Kroeger, this is my dog JT.”
Parr: “What up.”
Kroeger: “We're here to talk about visibility, and not like visibility like when your goggles fog up, or vulnerability, like when I told the world that I ski. We're here to talk about Vail visibility. This is the sickest place on Earth, a place with epic topography, where gravity gets disrespected on the daily. It’s God’s skatepark, but here’s the rub – no one knows about Vail. I hear people talk about Iceland more than us. That’s why we are here proposing that you provide every citizen and dog with a GoPro camera, so they can document their epic exploits. That way every gainer off kitchen wall, fat endo or serving of fondue at apres ski will be seen by the world, and they’ll want to come here.”
Parr: “Yeah, and it will be super, ah, superdipitous, because the GoPro games will be here the first week of June, which is sick. But it will be even sicker if locals are filming all of it. That way, we can recruit people from all over the world to join us on the slopes. What could be sicker than that?”
Parr then broke into song, singing three verses and the hook off the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1999 classic “Californication,” a song known for its music video which contains a video game snowboarding sequence.
The surprise visit from Kroeger and Parr brought something they might call “chill vibes” to the rest of the meeting, with Mayor Travis Coggin telling the next speaker she had a tough act to follow. Later in the meeting, another group from California, members of the engineering consultant team LSC Transportation Consultants, introduced themselves as Anthony Kiedis and Flea.
This story was made available via the Colorado News Collaborative. Learn more at https://colabnews.co
