In order to use a coderef as a method, you need to manually pass the object as the first arg.

Not necessarily.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More tests => 2;

package Foo;

sub new { bless {}, $_[0] }

sub report { return [ @_ ] }

package main;

my $foo      = Foo->new();
my $report   = \&Foo::report;
my $moreport = $foo->can( 'report' );

is_deeply( $foo->$report( 'abc' ),   [ $foo, 'abc' ],
    'coderef should work as method on object' );
is_deeply( $foo->$moreport( 'def' ), [ $foo, 'def' ],
    '... even if returned from can()' );
[download]