Haha Funny Florida Hurricane Memes Haha
Southwardporting a fizz cut, prison blues and a chin-strap beard, the slim 24-year-old Floridian Brandon Hatfield leans sideways in a rolling office chair inside the St. Johns County Jail. With a warm Southern drawl and a crooked smirk, he says, "I remember half of what happened … and one-half of what didn't."
Hatfield finds it hard to dissever the fact from the fiction of what took identify on the night of Nov. 5, 2018, for a few reasons. That night, at a Best Western not far from the Fountain of Youth theme park in St. Augustine, America'southward oldest urban center, he was drinking Jack Daniel'due south. He'southward sure the whiskey led to smoking weed, but he's not every bit clear on how that led to fentanyl, Ecstasy and whatever else concluded up in his toxicology report. He remembers the rest of the night in "blackout splatches," which have since mixed with the stories he's heard about himself: how he jumped into a crocodile pool at a local zoological park after hours, got bit by an American crocodile, and barely escaped with his life — but non his Crocs shoes, which were found floating in the water the side by side day. Adjacent thing he knew, he was waking up "at the infirmary shackled to a bed with my foot gnawed off."
Another reason Hatfield finds it hard to separate the "half of what happened" from the "half of what didn't": When he woke up, he wasn't himself anymore. Much every bit an arachnid bite changed Peter Parker into Spider-Man, that crocodile chomp transformed Brandon Hatfield into Florida Man. His tale was being retweeted around the earth: "Florida Homo Wearing Crocs Gets Bitten After Jumping Into Crocodile Exhibit at Alligator Farm."
Since Florida Human was beginning defined on Twitter in 2013 as the "world'south worst superhero," many men (and it's almost e'er men) have causeless the drape. He is a homo of a thousand tattooed faces, a slapstick outlaw, an Internet-traffic gilded mine, a cruel punchline, a beloved prankster, a human tragedy and, like some other love-hate American mascots, the subject of burgeoning controversy.
About memes — from planking to Tide Pods — fizzle fast. Florida Man has only grown stronger. At that place are so many stories about men like Hatfield that a "Florida Man Claiming" went viral this March, in which millions of people Googled their nascence dates and "Florida Man," finding a about-endless list of real news headlines for all 365 days of the year:
"Florida Human being Steals $300 Worth of Sexual activity Toys While Dressed as Ninja."
"Florida Man Tries to Pick Up Prostitute While Driving Special Needs School Double-decker."
"Florida Human being Drinks Goat Claret in Ritual Sacrifice, Runs for Senate."
The meme has grown beyond the inside jokes of Twitter and Reddit, spawning scores of late-dark one-act routines, queues of podcasts, multiple ring names, an episode of the FX show "Atlanta," an "X-Files" comic book, a documentary and, soon, a docuseries from the producers of "Get Out."
At its most comical, the Florida Homo phenomenon encapsulates the wildness of both America and the Internet. At its well-nigh salacious, it's a social-media update on the true-crime Television of "America'southward Dumbest Criminals" and the gallows humor of tabloid headlines. At its nigh insensitive, Florida Man profits by punching down at the homeless, drug-fond or mentally sick. Florida Man has become an American folk hero with all the contradictions of his predecessors, who, from John Henry to Buffalo Beak, were always a mix of what Hatfield calls the "half of what happened" and "one-half of what didn't." What those old folk tales and our new viral memes have in common is that they tend to reveal more than virtually the kind of stories nosotros want to share than the people they're ostensibly about.
I've laughed at headlines similar "Florida Man Arrested for Calling 911 Afterwards His Cat Was Denied Entry Into Strip Club." I've gawped at stories like "Florida Man Removes Facial Tattoos With Welding Grinder." But over the years I've besides started to become a queasy feeling of complicity when I click on headlines that play up the quirks of horrific crimes for Spider web traffic, similar "A Florida Man Shell His Daughter For 40 Minutes While Listening To Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines,' " a 101-word BuzzFeed story that found room to tastelessly embed the supermodel-studded music video.
This past April, I set out to see a few Florida Men backside the clickbait and answer some questions, like: Is Florida Man a hero, a villain or a victim? And is it yet okay to laugh forth?
The biggest question I get is: What were you thinking?" Brandon Hatfield continues, from his seat inside the St. Johns County Jail. "Every time, my answer is: I wasn't." Hatfield is telling his entire Florida Man story for the first time, and in much more detail than the thousands of versions told without his input. The details affair: Accept the two Croc-like shoes found floating in a crocodile enclosure, which prompted jokes and led the zookeeper to doubtable a prank. Hatfield is, on this April afternoon, wearing the same mode on his scarred left foot, the ane the crocodile attacked. (Five months and six surgeries later, doctors take barely managed to save it.) The pair of shoes constitute floating in the park had also been issued to him in jail, later on his first drug conviction at historic period 23.
On Instagram, Hatfield has claimed to exist a descendant of "Devil" Anse Hatfield, the wildcat outlaw who sparked the Hatfield-McCoy feud: Rebelliousness, he bragged, is in his blood. He grew up on his father'due south nearby dairy farm, herding cattle, angling, hunting and "doing crazy stuff, especially annihilation to do with animals." When Hatfield was 10, he says, he captured a rattlesnake and hid it in an aquarium in his bedroom closet, until it killed his pet boa constrictor and terrified his mother, a nurse. Afterward that, his amused stepdad stuffed the rattler — "and then we'd always call up," Hatfield says. From and then on, Hatfield bounced between his divorced parents' homes.
In centre school, Hatfield says, he started using marijuana. So, at "15 or 16, I got into prescription medication: opiates, benzos, stuff like that." When a friend died of a cocaine overdose in 2012, he says he stopped using, but "I crept back into information technology." "Subsequently pharmaceuticals, I graduated to cocaine, methamphetamine, everything." He got loftier to party and bargain with social anxiety. He compares himself to "Adam Sandler in that movie 'Click': It'due south like you hit intermission on life. Before you know it, you wake up and you're grown."
I've started to experience queasy when I click on headlines that play up the quirks of horrific crimes, like "A Florida Human being Beat His Daughter For xl Minutes While Listening To Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines.' "
On Nov. ii, 2018, Hatfield was convicted of 1000 theft auto and possession of a schedule Ii substance. He tells a convoluted story nigh how the car was his ain and the methamphetamine was his ex-girlfriend'south; the judge sentenced him to two years of parole. When Hatfield showed upward for his first parole engagement, he panicked, certain that if he went within, he'd be sent to land prison, since he'd already violated parole by leaving the canton. Wearing his jail Crocs, Hatfield sneaked out to the parking lot and chosen some friends, figuring, "If I'm going to prison, I'grand going to do it large for the weekend — and then turn myself in."
A few days afterwards, well into his bender at the All-time Western Bayfront hotel, Hatfield boasted to friends about how he grew up wrangling alligators from one pond to some other on his papa's country, to "balance the ecosystem." Nobody believed him. "I said, 'I'll take hold of an alligator correct now!' My friend said, 'I know a perfect place …' " The friends drove 2 miles to the St. Augustine Alligator Subcontract Zoological Park, the world'southward simply abode to all 24 crocodilian species, with a main pen holding 210 alligators. When Hatfield saw it, he nearly chickened out. "Only I got girls backside me," he told me. "So I go in."
News channels and sites told Hatfield's story through video clips stitched together from 4 hours of dark-vision security-cam footage, in which he is the zoo's acrobatic allure: Florida Man, in his native, ersatz habitat. He climbs onto a corrugated metal rooftop nearly 12 feet above a shallow pool occupied by large American crocodiles. He leaps in and thrashes equally he'southward chip. But what most news videos missed is that Hatfield escaped, unscathed, after his outset jump. So he jumped back in, turning himself into literal clickbait. "The whole thing was, I dropped my phone inside the pit," he says. "A brand-new iPhone. That's whenever he death-rolled me. Information technology de-sleeved the bottom of my pes, until it looked similar a chicken breast; I'd wiggle my toes and you could encounter my tendons movement."
On crutches at his first courtroom appearance, he heard the bailiffs and others "not bad jokes and calling him Crocodile Dundee," says his defence force chaser, Jill Barger. She took his instance pro bono because she pitied him, and also — "I'm not gonna lie," she admits — because Florida Men get valuable media attention.
His new convictions of criminal mischief and trespassing compounded his early charges. Guess Howard Maltz, who saw Hatfield on TMZ the night before meeting him in courtroom, sentenced him to 364 days in county jail, plus two years of community control. At Hatfield'south sentencing, Maltz told him, "You should non be alive. God has a plan for you. We may not know what it is, just God has a programme for you."
"I hear it all the fourth dimension," Hatfield says with a shrug. "Daniel in the lions' den." In the Bible, Daniel was thrown into a den of carnivorous beasts just found "clean-living" by his god and saved for a higher purpose. Hatfield likes this idea. He vows to get clean and do outreach. He says he'll warn Floridians non to follow in his encarmine footsteps and become a Florida Man like him, because he wishes he'd washed the same for his stepbrother, who died of a heroin overdose while Brandon was in jail. He's lost 3 relatives in the by year to drug-related deaths, he says. "My fiddling brother, Bo, passed abroad on heroin at 17. He was probably looking upwardly to me. I went to jail and left him out at that place by himself."
There'southward nothing funny nearly this office of Hatfield'southward viral story. It'south the "half of what happened" in well-nigh Florida Homo stories that doesn't fit in a tweet — the bummer half that has to do with how people cease upwards doing reckless things, and what follows viral infamy. "We laugh at these stupid things," Maltz tells me in his chambers. "But there are tragedies backside many of them."
I came to the jail to see how Hatfield ended up in that crocodile pit, but as well to enquire how the media attending had afflicted him. I causeless that he would be mortified to go viral on the worst day of his life — that the retweets would merely add shameful insult to actual injury. But that's not how he saw it. "At start I was embarrassed," he says. "Merely I'm prone to exercise stuff like this anyway, and so it was just a thing of fourth dimension earlier something blew upward."
Hatfield talks near his newfound Internet notoriety like he's Brer Rabbit, thrown into the digital bramble patch where he was born and bred. "I was always on the Internet: I go live on Facebook. I alive on Instagram." Drugs have been Hatfield's escape from the real earth, but social media is where he feels most honest: "It'southward the existent me."
In jail, he's enjoying his notoriety (although he "can't wait to get my phone," he says). "In that location own't nobody in this jail who don't know who I am," he says. Especially since the whole cell block saw him on "Inside Edition." He estimates he'due south signed at least threescore autographs for inmates with his various nicknames: Gator Male child, Croc Boy or his favorite, Crocodile DunGotti — "John Gotti mixed with Crocodile Dundee." He reads fan letters, including some from people who "think I'm like an animal activist or something." He's because a clothing line with a Gator Boy logo of himself "wrangling or riding a gator like it'due south a bull." The only problem, he says, staring at his hands, is this: "I'k meant to be a superhero. Nobody always sits down, says: 'You doing all right?' "
Before leaving St. Augustine, I visit two of the town's nigh popular attractions. At the Old Jail, built in 1891, I watch tourists hang their heads and arms through the quondam oak public stocks, similar shamed Florida Men of yesteryear. At the Medieval Torture Museum, a goth-y tour guide tells me that her museum's stocks and castigating masks don't terrify her nearly as much as the thought of becoming a Florida Woman. "If my mug shot got out there? Oh God, I'd take to leave town!"
Her fear makes sense, because there is always another Florida Human or Woman. Inside days of Brandon Hatfield'southward arrest in November, the Internet moved on to "Florida Man Dressed every bit Fred Flintstone Pulled Over for Speeding." It's been this mode every mean solar day since the meme's birth in 2013.
By then, Florida's pop-civilization reputation for drugs ("Scarface"), crime ("Miami Vice," "CSI: Miami"), partying (MTV'southward "Spring Break") and craziness (James Franco in "Spring Breakers") was well established. The 2000 Bush-Gore recount had fabricated the state a punching bag for comedians similar "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart, who once called Florida a "behemothic cockroach-choking, hazard-infested, Hooters-dining, reptile-abusing, Everglades-draining, election-ruining, stripper-motorboating, brawl-sweat-scented, genitalia-shaped, 24-hour mug-shot factory." Pick an upshot, whatsoever result, and Florida, the state with the nigh lightning strike fatalities, has become a lightning rod for it — whether that's climate change ("Florida Man Jumps in Canal of Toxic Blue-Dark-green Algae"), clearing ("Here Is Trump Loving a Florida Man's 'Joke' About Murdering Immigrants"), or poverty ("Florida Human Tries to Pawn His Baby.")
On May 26, 2012, a homeless man named Ronald Poppo became patient zero for Florida Human's viral outbreak, when a carwash employee named Rudy Eugene attacked him on Miami's MacArthur Causeway. "He just ripped me to ribbons," Poppo, who barely survived, later told a news crew. "He chewed up my face, he popped out my optics." Eugene was shot expressionless on sight by police force, and, though his toxicology written report was ultimately inconclusive, he became a bogeyman for the drugs collectively known as bathroom salts. He went viral as the Causeway Cannibal and the Miami Zombie. According to Google Trends data, this is when the term "Florida Man" first peaked.
Florida Human is a microcosm of the fashion so many of usa are struggling with the ideals of how to carry on the Internet, and how easily an ironic joke can begin to experience like freak-show mockery.
Nine months subsequently, the @_FloridaMan Twitter account debuted with the tagline, "Real-life stories of the world'southward worst superhero." The get-go tweet prepare the tone: "Florida Man Arrested Subsequently Pocket-Dialing 911." Within weeks, the account had gone viral and was covered past legit outlets similar NPR and Slate. Over the past six years, the business relationship has grown to over 400,000 followers, but its creator remained anonymous — partly at first considering he didn't take it all that seriously, he tells me, and more recently because "I feel like I created a monster."
Florida Human being's Dr. Frankenstein is Freddie Campion, 33, who finally agreed to step out from behind his face-tattooed Twitter avatar after a series of long off-the-record phone calls, in which he shared his growing unease with what he'd created. "The irony is not lost on me that I thrust some people into the spotlight when they didn't want it," he says by telephone from his lawn in Los Angeles. "I was asking for the courtesy that wasn't afforded to a lot of other people."
In early 2013, Campion, now a video producer and writer, was an associate editor at GQ, "desperately broken-hearted to impress everybody" in an office where the best mode to do it was to make height editors laugh. (I was a senior editor at GQ merely didn't overlap with Campion.) Equally a civilization author, he loved the Onion'due south graphic symbol Area Homo, which spoofed local news, and the "Due south Park" action figure Alabama Human being, which spoofed macho toys. "The confront-eating zombie story had happened, and I was but thinking: Florida's a crazy place," he says. "I don't really know what my reason was, beyond: This doesn't be, and so why don't I arrive?"
To Campion, who was raised in the United Kingdom, Florida was pure, undiluted Americana. "I never idea I was making fun of Florida because Florida is America," he says. "It'southward made up of people who moved here 5 years ago. Even when I think of Florida Homo as a graphic symbol, he moved to Florida after he faked his death in another state."
For Florida Human to evolve from the primordial swamp-gas of the Internet, the environmental atmospheric condition had to exist just right. Florida is the third-most populous land, so it naturally has a lot of everything — good, bad and weird. The country's sunshine laws, passed in 1967, make public records — mug shots, arrest reports, video evidence and 911 calls — available to anyone, with the ease of one-click shopping. Then there'due south the land'south strange geography: swampland infested with alligators and pythons, the most sinkholes in the nation. Equally for police and order, the state counts near 2 1000000 concealed weapons permits, 1.4 million felons, and "stand your ground" laws. Thanks to the temperate climate, there's no offseason for criminals or pranksters or nudists. And, as local writers from Carl Hiaasen to Dave Barry to Lauren Groff take noted, the h2o tabular array of weirdness is just naturally loftier in Florida. Strangeness seems to bubble to the surface.
The perfect Florida Man tweet always seemed to become at the state'south reputation for being, equally comedian John Mulaney said on an episode of "Tardily Night With Seth Meyers," "the Costco of upsetting people. … Information technology's only everything at once." Campion'south funniest tweets seemed to pile 1 gag, or clickable keyword, on top of another, like a Marx Brothers routine. "Other states have heat, lax gun laws, lack of regulation — even alligators — but not all at in one case," says Campion. As an example, he singles out a Floridian who was arrested for illegal foraging. "Then you find out he's foraging for magic mushrooms," Campion says. "That probably wouldn't happen in Minnesota. And he's on magic mushrooms. And so they open his haversack and at that place'due south a baby alligator in information technology. Any ane item isn't a large deal. But combine them: That'south a Florida Man story."
The success of Florida Man parallels the rising of smartphone video, and a generation of people "trying to go viral in their own trivial networks," says Campion, "and and then it working too well." He points to the Florida Men who filmed their pranks, went viral and and so got arrested for, say, riding manatees (they're endangered) or throwing an alligator through a Wendy's drive-through (creature cruelty). Not to mention digital freak-prove pranksters like Alisha Hessler, a.g.a. Jasmine TriDevil, who tried to convince the world she had surgically added a third breast.
Campion says he didn't so much create the meme as popularize information technology — largely considering, as shortly every bit he launched the account, it took on a life of its own. At kickoff, he was simply thrilled to get directly messages "from absurd people on Twitter." Then spoof news sites and clone accounts popped up, screen-grabbing his tweets. A subreddit exploded to over half a million members. All over the Internet, sites began doing "all-time Florida Man" listicles. Journalists began sliding into his DMs and pitching him their stories, thirsty for retweets. In 2014, Seth Meyers began hosting a late-nighttime "Faux or Florida" trivia quiz.
In the start, Campion had to rewrite headlines from local crime blotters. Merely earlier long, he says, fifty-fifty "local news channels in Utah" and international tabloids were adopting his style and chasing high-traffic keywords — broadening the attain of Florida Homo to include politicians, celebrities and YouTubers. Indeed, if aliens were to go far in Florida — a land that ranks third in UFO sightings — they could tell a pop history through the way the Florida Human being virus grafted itself onto other trending topics: "Florida man shoots at Pokémon Go players outside business firm." "Florida man changes name to Bruce Jenner to preserve name's 'heterosexual roots.' " "Florida man says it'south okay to grope woman on flight because Trump says information technology's okay."
When Campion's Twitter business relationship striking the front page of the New York Times in May 2015, "Book agents were DM-ing me, telling me if I write a ane-paragraph treatment they can sell it that afternoon," he says. "But I didn't want to write a toilet book."
Past 2016, Campion began to worry. At this point, he says, he realized his little face-tattooed boy had grown upwardly and left him behind. Soon, Campion was noticing that, while people were still sharing harmless or satirical tales, "90 pct of the stories people were sending me were hateful-spirited."
Moreover, as greenbacks-strapped media brands laid off journalists, Florida's sunshine laws, combined with Florida Man's viral appeal, enabled outlets to efficiently feed the Internet with a high volume of sensational crime stories, at minimal expense, and with relatively lilliputian legwork. Since Florida Man is cheap news, and his search-engine-optimized popularity is self-reinforcing, he's more likely to be shared than some random Kansas Human being. At present Florida Man seems to take become the whole Internet's local news.
Initially, the account was like Florida Man Mack Yearwood, who posted his "Wanted" photo on Facebook, never suspecting information technology would lead to his abort. "If I was to starting time this whole thing again, I'd be thinking virtually it in a very different way, because now nosotros think well-nigh the Internet in a different fashion," Campion says. The large divergence is that, "in 2013, we didn't think what happened on the Net could affect real life."
Like many of usa, Campion gradually became more aware of social media's real-world consequences and downsides: election interference, Internet bullying and privacy concerns, for starters. He saw the fashion the Florida Man meme immortalized fifty-fifty misdemeanors and seemed to overlap with the pay-to-redact mug shot publication industry, which the American Bar Association has dubbed an "online extortion scheme" and which Florida only recently regulated, in July 2018 (though many newspapers notwithstanding host for-profit, ad-supported microsites devoted entirely to searchable mug shot databases). Campion as well began to worry that Florida Human being reinforced the simplistic skillful-cops-and-bad-robbers narratives of reality entertainment like "Cops" and "Alive PD," and cutting against the grain of movements like Black Lives Matter.
In 2017, Campion briefly stopped posting to the account. The comedy felt stale, but he was as well asking himself, " 'How much practice I want to be a party to substantially making fun of people on the worst day of their lives, even if they take done something wrong?' Similar, who gave the Internet the right to add to someone's penalisation?" After a several-month hiatus, Campion returned to the Twitter account, determined to "steer it in a better management." He began alternating funny tweets with social-justice petitions and news stories about police force abuse and reform. Later trivial more than than a smattering of retweets and signatures from his near half-1000000 followers, he decided that @_FloridaMan should run across the fate that greets so many in Florida: This March, he marked the account "RETIRED."
Florida Man is a microcosm of the way then many of united states are struggling with the ethics of how to comport on the Cyberspace, and how easily an ironic joke, multiplied by millions of shares, can begin to feel like freak-show mockery or viral cyberbullying. As isolated jokes, Florida Human riffs seem harmless enough; in aggregate it feels as if they've become role of a larger culture that reduces people in the criminal justice system to villains or punchlines, while stripping away the context of systemic problems. The Reddit forum moderator has asked contributors to remember that Florida Man "doesn't practice dark and overly morbid things" — to no avail. Craig Pittman, author of "Oh, Florida!," a loving compendium of Floridian shenanigans, told the Columbia Journalism Review that he had begun to exist more selective about the stories he promoted. "Is the person homeless?" he said. "If that is the example, I won't mail service the story."
Campion says he hopes people, as he is, are learning to be more than responsible most what they share online, merely he doesn't seem too optimistic. With the air of a disappointed father who loves his wayward son just doesn't know how to assist him, Campion adds, "I'd still love to meet Florida Man have a happy ending."
For at present, some Florida Men are taking matters into their own hands, figuring they shouldn't be the just ones who aren't profiting off the meme — like Lawrence Sullivan, who tattooed his entire face to look similar the Joker from "The Dark Knight," and has been releasing agonizing shock-rap videos, or Charles McDowell, who went viral in the autumn. Propelled to infamy by an Escambia Canton Sheriff's Office "Wheel of Fugitives" Tv set segment, McDowell was mocked relentlessly for his extremely thick neck. With the help of a Florida-based crew of social-media strategists chosen the Shrimp Gang and an MMA fight promoter, he flipped it around, rebranding himself as @DamnWideNeck. He gained 1.iii one thousand thousand Instagram followers, including DJ Khaled and Snoop Dogg, and teamed upwardly with scrawny white YouTuber Daddy Long Neck for the goofy racial-harmony-and-babes music video "All Necks Matter," which scored over 10 meg views beyond platforms. After McDowell'due south contempo rearrest, his direction posted, "He will be out in the Neckst 4-half-dozen months."
Recently, the storm of controversy over Florida Homo has been upgraded to perhaps a Category iv, later a high-pressure surge of criticism in outlets similar the Guardian and the Columbia Journalism Review. The podcast "Citations Needed" created a browser plug-in that substitutes the term "Florida Man" with "Man Likely Suffering From Mental Affliction or Drug Addiction." On Facebook, the otherwise sunny page Experience Expert Florida has been pushing the hashtag #deathtofloridaman. It seems Florida Man is, to quote a Batman moving picture, one of those heroes who lives long enough to get a villain. Or maybe, like Brandon Hatfield, he can exist an instructive example: a focal bespeak for a conversation about what we're doing when we share funny news on the Internet.
Whatsoever such conversation, however, has to account for the redemptive side of Florida Man — the unproblematic fact that a lot of people don't simply mock him as a villain or exploit him as a victim. Two of Reddit'southward 10 about popular Florida Human being stories are really exposés of police corruption, including "Florida Human arrested for possession of laundry detergent — not heroin — among 11 freed after deputy allegedly faked drug tests." What's more, many Floridians embrace their native son every bit an it-coulda-been-me populist hero, standing upwardly for the country's stubborn strangeness. In Tampa, Cigar Metropolis Brewing has named its Florida Man IPA after "a hero who'southward forgotten more about amateur taxidermy and alligator rasslin' than yous'll ever know." In Miami, a drag performer named Florida Man has gone viral for performing an Ariana Grande striking in a Voldemort costume. In Orlando, there's been a Florida Man Music Festival and a "Florida Man" ane-man play. In Tampa, a tour guide leads Florida Homo walking (and drinking) tours, and writer Tyler Gillespie has published an empathetic book of poems about Florida Man, including one inspired past his own DUI.
In Jacksonville, Mike Alancourt, a white-disguised, 43-year-old teacher'southward assistant, went viral this wintertime equally "Florida man wins the cyberspace with hip-hop dance routine." He ended upwards on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and in an official Postal service Malone music video, and though he describes himself every bit "technically the antithesis of Florida Man … a gay bearded hippie who belongs in Seattle," he's since embraced the label. "I can't necessarily get with everything Florida Human has done, but I get with the part that says we should all be who we are," he says. "That picayune flake of weird you take? Florida Man says: Embrace it. The redeeming quality of Florida Man is he don't give a f—."
"If I was to start this whole thing again, I'd exist thinking about information technology in a very different fashion, considering now we think about the Internet in a different way," says Freddie Campion, founder of the @_FloridaMan Twitter account. The big divergence is that, "in 2013, we didn't call back what happened on the Cyberspace could affect existent life."
Per Google Trends information, the meme has never been more pop. Particularly in his home state, many people reject the idea that Florida Human should exist Internet-canceled. Since he's on the verge of becoming an unofficial state mascot, information technology's appropriately absurd that the proper mode to honour him is being seriously debated by Jacksonville's goofy minor-league baseball squad, the Jumbo Shrimp. In late July, the team will host a Florida Man Night, featuring a jorts-clad Florida Man bobblehead, a performance by at to the lowest degree 1 actual Florida Man and the breaking of "weird Florida laws." The night's advertising sponsor is the police offices of John M. Phillips, an attorney who says he's get "Florida Homo every bit a lawyer."
It'southward not merely considering Phillips has represented a Florida Man who shot off his own penis, and five Florida Women — in separate instances — who were run over by vehicles while sunbathing on the beach. Online, you can find a prune of Phillips on "Let's Brand a Deal," dressed up similar Alexander Hamilton as he wins a Ocean-Doo watercraft. He has sued Trayvon Martin's killer, George Zimmerman, defended a man who made Super Basin-inspired "Left Shark" figurines against copyright claims by Katy Perry, and represented Omarosa Manigault Newman.
Phillips understands the contradictions of Florida Human more than near. He grew up in Alabama and hung a Confederate flag in his white fraternity's dorm room. "Everything changed for me," he says, when he represented the family of Jordan Davis, the unarmed blackness teenager murdered by a white human being, Michael Dunn. As Phillips explains in a TEDxJacksonville talk, the instance caused him to reconsider his racial privilege and reorient his career around civil rights.
I ask Phillips the obvious question: How can yous gloat the meme'due south comical side, knowing that information technology also makes light of horrific crimes? "I would never phone call Michael Dunn a Florida Man, because Michael Dunn was a murderer, and to acquaintance him with Florida Man minimizes what he did," says Phillips carefully. And then he sighs and concedes: "Simply that's how the article would be written: 'Florida Man flees after shooting three teenagers, claiming Stand up Your Footing.' "
Phillips says he recognizes that the joke often isn't funny, "because of the mental health issues and drug dependency that do sometimes cause the quote-unquote Florida Man syndrome." He cites the bug facing military veterans and the homeless, the opioid epidemic and the country's nearly concealed carry gun permits. "In the Gunshine Country," he says, "Florida Human being can plough on you real quick." He knows the meme is messy and often offensive and cruel. Only he also thinks Florida Human tin exist beauteous. With lawyerly precision, he defines Florida Man every bit a person who embodies "complimentary-spirited recklessness" and "doesn't put other people in impairment's way."
"In that location's a level of Florida Man in all of us," Phillips says. "The question is how you channel it."
Is information technology okay to laugh at Florida Man? In the comedy business, the respond to such a question is always an unsatisfying "It depends." When y'all're joking about real people, it by and large depends on whether you're laughing at someone, in a dehumanizing kind of style, or if you lot're laughing with someone — often because, even (or peculiarly) in their worst moment, they remind you of yourself. The once-absurdist Florida Man meme has undoubtedly curdled into callous jokes at the expense of the vulnerable. But plenty of people laugh with Florida Human, knowing how easy it is to become one. Ultimately, many of these stories aren't as extraordinary as the headlines; they just have that i odd detail — or one memorable mug shot — that, if spun correctly, might plough one person's DUI into another'south LOL.
Like a lot of memes, Florida Man's popularity doesn't exactly prove or disprove the inherent wisdom of the crowd then much as information technology highlights our collective contradictions. We similar to cheer on the underdog and revel in someone else's hurting. We enjoy mocking and empathizing with the unfortunate, partly because clickbait-or-bust social media is essentially built to multiply i superficial behavioral extreme or the other.
And so when the Jacksonville Colossal Shrimp planned their Florida Homo night, they looked for a family-friendly mascot who represented the best of Florida Homo without dragging along the worst of his baggage: a Floridian who hadn't hurt anyone, who wasn't being exploited, and who was happy to have people laugh along with him. They constitute Lane Pittman, a multiple-time Florida Homo who rallies the crowd at Jacksonville Jaguars NFL games, waving flags and firing T-shirt cannons as part of the Jax Pack hype team.
At the Jumbo Shrimp'due south Florida Homo Night, Pittman will play the national anthem on electric guitar considering, the first time he went viral, he was "Florida human arrested after playing national anthem on July 4." In the video seen everywhere from BuzzFeed to Fox News, Pittman, wearing jorts and an American flag tank top, shreds like Hendrix on a Neptune Beach sidewalk until hundreds of people gather around and he is arrested for obstructing traffic.
"I was similar: This is American as crap! Freedom, baby!" Pittman reminisces. "I had everybody dabbing me up, high-fiving me. I had one old lady osculation me on the face up. Then two cops came over."
The second time he went viral, he uploaded a nine-second video of himself — no shirt, no shoes, just board shorts — headbanging and holding an American flag confronting the torrential wind and rain of 2016's Hurricane Matthew, to the blare of Slayer'southward "Raining Claret." The video was viewed virtually iv meg times. His rock gods, including Slayer, retweeted him. Foo Fighters merely tweeted: "LANE PITTMAN." Frontman Dave Grohl posed in Billboard, wearing a T-shirt with Lane'due south flag-waving, headbanging caricature.
When I meet Pittman at a hard-stone music festival in downtown Jacksonville, the lean 26-year-old surfer dude with long red pilus is wearing jorts and an American flag tank top — what he calls "my Hurricane Lane persona." Among the roar of speed metal, Pittman hypes up fans at a popular-up advertising space, where a long line of autograph seekers wait on members of Korn and Evanescence.
Pittman's hurricane videos have get a hurricane-flavour YouTube ritual — a rain trip the light fantastic toe in disobedience of the weather. In some means, the original video is — like frozen Florida orange juice — the about full-bodied and syrupy example of what it means to be a Florida Man: a wild human who stands firm against propriety, the forces that threaten to destroy this foreign paradise, and common sense itself.
Pittman'southward career path as a professionalized Florida Man began in high schoolhouse, when he was elected grade clown. He honed his theatrics while working a $10-an-60 minutes gig equally a roadside sign spinner with Big Guy Moving, Velcroed into a muscle accommodate in the xc-caste heat. These days, Pittman, who fronts a metal ring and does social media consulting, is the about clean-cut Florida Human being yous can imagine, despite being a metalhead icon embraced past Slayer. He doesn't curse or drink. He's a devout youth leader of his Baptist church, an assistant lacrosse coach and a substitute music instructor who asks to "bless it up real quick" before eating his egg biscuit at Starbucks. He embraces the pall of Florida Man, though he doesn't sympathize with some of his more disreputable brethren.
"On Facebook somebody tagged me alongside a guy who ran through a convenience mart with a gator, like, 'Y'all should be friends!' " says Pittman. "I'm like: I don't desire to exist his friend!"
Listening to Pittman, I can't help but remember of my own mixed feelings about the meme, which bundle up my adequately conventional anxieties about social media: I worry that this miraculous, unprecedented amount of information and connection is making us less compassionate toward people we run into and meet online, and I suspect that it's but going to get worse. Given how quickly falsehoods spread online, I ask Pittman if it bothers him that people probably do confuse the real Florida with the meme.
In between selfies with fans, Pittman brushes dorsum his sweaty hair and tells me that his take on Florida Man and the Internet is simpler, and more optimistic: Every country has its idiots, criminals and problems; information technology's unfair that his home country takes so much flak. But people generally know what's right. And, also, it's not going to stop him, or any other Florida Human being, from acting crazy if they feel like it.
"People throw shade at Florida. Like, a lot." A brief cloud passes over his upbeat mood, then the Florida Human being smiles. "But yous tin can't put shade on us. We're the Sunshine Country!"
Logan Hill is a writer who has contributed to New York magazine, "This American Life," Wired and others. To annotate on this story, email wpmagazine@washpost.com or visit wapo.st/magazine.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Florida's sunshine laws were passed in 1995. They were passed in 1967 and amended in 1995. It also incorrectly called Jack Daniel's a bourbon. It is a Tennessee whiskey.
Credits: Story by Logan Hill. Designed by Michael Johnson. Illustrated by Peter Arkle.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/15/feature/is-it-okay-to-laugh-at-florida-man-2/