Florida Where Its Very Funny Where the Guy Says Accept It

Due southporting a buzz cut, prison house dejection and a chin-strap beard, the slim 24-year-quondam Floridian Brandon Hatfield leans sideways in a rolling part chair inside the St. Johns County Jail. With a warm Southern drawl and a kleptomaniacal smirk, he says, "I remember one-half of what happened … and half of what didn't."

Hatfield finds it hard to separate the fact from the fiction of what took place on the nighttime 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's oldest urban center, he was drinking Jack Daniel's. He'south certain the whiskey led to smoking weed, just he's not every bit articulate on how that led to fentanyl, Ecstasy and whatever else ended upwards in his toxicology report. He remembers the rest of the night in "blackout splatches," which have since mixed with the stories he's heard virtually himself: how he jumped into a crocodile pool at a local zoological park subsequently hours, got fleck by an American crocodile, and barely escaped with his life — but not his Crocs shoes, which were plant floating in the water the side by side day. Next thing he knew, he was waking up "at the hospital shackled to a bed with my foot gnawed off."

Some other reason Hatfield finds it hard to separate the "half of what happened" from the "one-half of what didn't": When he woke up, he wasn't himself anymore. Much as an arachnid seize with teeth changed Peter Parker into Spider-Man, that crocodile chomp transformed Brandon Hatfield into Florida Man. His tale was existence retweeted effectually the globe: "Florida Human being Wearing Crocs Gets Bitten Later Jumping Into Crocodile Showroom at Alligator Farm."

Since Florida Man was get-go defined on Twitter in 2013 every bit the "globe's worst superhero," many men (and it's almost always men) have assumed the mantle. He is a human being of a thousand tattooed faces, a slapstick outlaw, an Internet-traffic gold mine, a barbarous punchline, a honey prankster, a human tragedy and, like another love-hate American mascots, the subject of burgeoning controversy.

Nearly memes — from planking to Tide Pods — fizzle fast. Florida Man has only grown stronger. In that location are so many stories about men like Hatfield that a "Florida Man Claiming" went viral this March, in which millions of people Googled their nascency dates and "Florida Man," finding a near-endless list of existent news headlines for all 365 days of the year:

"Florida Human Steals $300 Worth of Sex Toys While Dressed as Ninja."

"Florida Homo Tries to Choice Up Prostitute While Driving Special Needs School Motorcoach."

"Florida Homo Drinks Goat Blood in Ritual Sacrifice, Runs for Senate."

The meme has grown beyond the inside jokes of Twitter and Reddit, spawning scores of late-night comedy routines, queues of podcasts, multiple band names, an episode of the FX show "Atlanta," an "X-Files" comic book, a documentary and, soon, a docuseries from the producers of "Leave."

At its most comical, the Florida Human phenomenon encapsulates the wildness of both America and the Cyberspace. At its most salacious, it's a social-media update on the true-crime TV of "America's Dumbest Criminals" and the gallows humour of tabloid headlines. At its almost insensitive, Florida Human profits by punching downwardly at the homeless, drug-addicted or mentally ill. Florida Man has become an American folk hero with all the contradictions of his predecessors, who, from John Henry to Buffalo Bill, 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 near the kind of stories we want to share than the people they're ostensibly about.

I've laughed at headlines like "Florida Man Arrested for Calling 911 After 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 also started to get a queasy feeling of complicity when I click on headlines that play upward the quirks of horrific crimes for Spider web traffic, like "A Florida Man Beat His Girl For twoscore 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 meet a few Florida Men behind the clickbait and answer some questions, like: Is Florida Man a hero, a villain or a victim? And is it still okay to express mirth along?

The biggest question I go is: What were you thinking?" Brandon Hatfield continues, from his seat inside the St. Johns County Jail. "Every fourth dimension, my answer is: I wasn't." Hatfield is telling his entire Florida Homo story for the first time, and in much more than detail than the thousands of versions told without his input. The details thing: Take the ii Croc-like shoes found floating in a crocodile enclosure, which prompted jokes and led the zookeeper to suspect a prank. Hatfield is, on this April afternoon, wearing the same style on his scarred left foot, the one the crocodile attacked. (5 months and six surgeries later, doctors have barely managed to relieve it.) The pair of shoes found floating in the park had also been issued to him in jail, after his beginning drug confidence at age 23.

On Instagram, Hatfield has claimed to be 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's nearby dairy farm, herding cattle, fishing, hunting and "doing crazy stuff, especially anything to do with animals." When Hatfield was x, 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 female parent, a nurse. After that, his amused stepdad stuffed the rattler — "and so we'd always remember," Hatfield says. From then on, Hatfield bounced between his divorced parents' homes.

In center school, Hatfield says, he started using marijuana. Then, 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 dorsum into information technology." "After pharmaceuticals, I graduated to cocaine, methamphetamine, everything." He got loftier to political party and deal with social anxiety. He compares himself to "Adam Sandler in that motion-picture show 'Click': It's similar you hit pause on life. Before you know it, you wake upwards and you're grown."

I've started to experience queasy when I click on headlines that play upward the quirks of horrific crimes, like "A Florida Man Beat out His Girl For 40 Minutes While Listening To Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines.' "

On Nov. 2, 2018, Hatfield was convicted of grand theft auto and possession of a schedule Two substance. He tells a convoluted story about how the car was his own and the methamphetamine was his ex-girlfriend's; the judge sentenced him to two years of parole. When Hatfield showed upward for his offset parole appointment, he panicked, certain that if he went inside, he'd be sent to state prison house, since he'd already violated parole by leaving the county. Wearing his jail Crocs, Hatfield sneaked out to the parking lot and chosen some friends, figuring, "If I'thou going to prison house, I'm going to practice it big for the weekend — and then turn myself in."

A few days later, well into his bender at the Best Western Bayfront hotel, Hatfield boasted to friends near how he grew up wrangling alligators from one pond to some other on his papa'southward land, to "balance the ecosystem." Nobody believed him. "I said, 'I'll catch an alligator right now!' My friend said, 'I know a perfect identify …' " The friends drove two miles to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park, the globe's only home to all 24 crocodilian species, with a main pen holding 210 alligators. When Hatfield saw it, he nearly chickened out. "But I got girls behind me," he told me. "So I go in."

News channels and sites told Hatfield's story through video clips stitched together from four hours of night-vision security-cam footage, in which he is the zoo's acrobatic allure: Florida Homo, in his native, ersatz habitat. He climbs onto a corrugated metal rooftop about 12 feet above a shallow pool occupied by large American crocodiles. He leaps in and thrashes every bit he's bit. But what virtually news videos missed is that Hatfield escaped, unscathed, after his first bound. Then 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 foot, until it looked like a chicken chest; I'd wiggle my toes and y'all could see my tendons motility."

On crutches at his first court advent, he heard the bailiffs and others "neat jokes and calling him Crocodile Dundee," says his defense attorney, Jill Barger. She took his case pro bono because she pitied him, and also — "I'm non gonna lie," she admits — because Florida Men go valuable media attention.

His new convictions of criminal mischief and trespassing compounded his early charges. Judge Howard Maltz, who saw Hatfield on TMZ the night earlier meeting him in courtroom, sentenced him to 364 days in county jail, plus ii years of community command. At Hatfield's sentencing, Maltz told him, "You should not be alive. God has a plan for you. Nosotros may non know what it is, merely God has a programme for y'all."

"I hear information technology all the time," Hatfield says with a shrug. "Daniel in the lions' den." In the Bible, Daniel was thrown into a den of carnivorous beasts but constitute "blameless" by his god and saved for a college purpose. Hatfield likes this idea. He vows to get clean and do outreach. He says he'll warn Floridians not to follow in his bloody footsteps and become a Florida Human like him, considering he wishes he'd done 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 little blood brother, Bo, passed abroad on heroin at 17. He was probably looking up to me. I went to jail and left him out there by himself."

There's nix funny nearly this function of Hatfield's viral story. It'south the "half of what happened" in nigh Florida Man stories that doesn't fit in a tweet — the bummer one-half that has to practice with how people end upward doing reckless things, and what follows viral infamy. "We express joy at these stupid things," Maltz tells me in his chambers. "Simply in that location are tragedies behind many of them."

I came to the jail to meet how Hatfield ended upwardly in that crocodile pit, but likewise to enquire how the media attention had affected him. I assumed that he would be mortified to get viral on the worst day of his life — that the retweets would only add shameful insult to actual injury. Just that'south not how he saw information technology. "At first I was embarrassed," he says. "Merely I'm prone to do stuff similar this anyhow, so it was just a matter of time earlier something blew upwards."

Hatfield talks about his newfound Cyberspace notoriety similar he's Brer Rabbit, thrown into the digital brier patch where he was born and bred. "I was always on the Internet: I go alive on Facebook. I alive on Instagram." Drugs have been Hatfield'due south escape from the existent globe, but social media is where he feels most honest: "Information technology's the real me."

In jail, he'due south enjoying his notoriety (although he "can't expect to get my phone," he says). "There ain't nobody in this jail who don't know who I am," he says. Especially since the whole cell cake saw him on "Within Edition." He estimates he's signed at least sixty autographs for inmates with his various nicknames: Gator Boy, 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 similar an animal activist or something." He'southward considering a clothing line with a Gator Boy logo of himself "wrangling or riding a gator like it's a bull." The only problem, he says, staring at his hands, is this: "I'1000 meant to exist a superhero. Nobody ever sits downward, says: 'You doing all right?' "

Before leaving St. Augustine, I visit two of the town's most pop attractions. At the Old Jail, built in 1891, I watch tourists hang their heads and artillery through the old oak public stocks, like shamed Florida Men of yesteryear. At the Medieval Torture Museum, a goth-y bout guide tells me that her museum's stocks and punitive masks don't terrify her virtually every bit much as the thought of becoming a Florida Woman. "If my mug shot got out there? Oh God, I'd have to leave town!"

Her fear makes sense, because there is e'er some other Florida Man or Woman. Within days of Brandon Hatfield's abort in Nov, the Internet moved on to "Florida Human being Dressed as Fred Flint Pulled Over for Speeding." Information technology'southward been this way every mean solar day since the meme's birth in 2013.

By and then, Florida's pop-civilisation reputation for drugs ("Scarface"), criminal offense ("Miami Vice," "CSI: Miami"), partying (MTV's "Spring Intermission") and craziness (James Franco in "Leap Breakers") was well established. The 2000 Bush-Gore recount had made the country a punching bag for comedians like "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart, who once called Florida a "giant cockroach-choking, risk-infested, Hooters-dining, reptile-abusing, Everglades-draining, election-ruining, stripper-motorboating, ball-sweat-scented, genitalia-shaped, 24-hour mug-shot mill." Choice an event, whatsoever consequence, and Florida, the state with the most lightning strike fatalities, has become a lightning rod for it — whether that's climatic change ("Florida Man Jumps in Canal of Toxic Bluish-Green Algae"), immigration ("Here Is Trump Loving a Florida Homo's 'Joke' Virtually Murdering Immigrants"), or poverty ("Florida Man Tries to Pawn His Baby.")

On May 26, 2012, a homeless man named Ronald Poppo became patient zippo for Florida Homo'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 coiffure. "He chewed upwards my face, he popped out my eyes." Eugene was shot dead on sight by police force, and, though his toxicology report was ultimately inconclusive, he became a bogeyman for the drugs collectively known as bathroom salts. He went viral equally the Causeway Cannibal and the Miami Zombie. Co-ordinate to Google Trends data, this is when the term "Florida Homo" start peaked.

Florida Man is a microcosm of the way so many of the states are struggling with the ethics of how to behave on the Internet, and how easily an ironic joke can begin to feel like freak-show mockery.

9 months later, the @_FloridaMan Twitter account debuted with the tagline, "Real-life stories of the earth's worst superhero." The get-go tweet set the tone: "Florida Human Arrested After Pocket-Dialing 911." Within weeks, the account had gone viral and was covered by legit outlets similar NPR and Slate. Over the past six years, the account has grown to over 400,000 followers, but its creator remained anonymous — partly at showtime because he didn't take it all that seriously, he tells me, and more recently because "I experience similar I created a monster."

Florida Human's Dr. Frankenstein is Freddie Campion, 33, who finally agreed to step out from backside his face up-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 phone 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 acquaintance editor at GQ, "desperately broken-hearted to impress everybody" in an office where the all-time way to exercise it was to make summit editors laugh. (I was a senior editor at GQ but didn't overlap with Campion.) Equally a culture author, he loved the Onion's character Area Man, which spoofed local news, and the "South Park" activity effigy Alabama Homo, which spoofed manlike toys. "The face-eating zombie story had happened, and I was but thinking: Florida'due south a crazy place," he says. "I don't actually know what my reason was, beyond: This doesn't exist, so why don't I make information technology?"

To Campion, who was raised in the United kingdom, Florida was pure, undiluted Americana. "I never thought I was making fun of Florida because Florida is America," he says. "It's made up of people who moved hither five years ago. Even when I think of Florida Human being as a character, he moved to Florida after he faked his death in some other state."

For Florida Man to evolve from the primordial swamp-gas of the Cyberspace, the environmental conditions had to be merely correct. Florida is the tertiary-almost populous state, so information technology naturally has a lot of everything — good, bad and weird. The state's sunshine laws, passed in 1967, make public records — mug shots, abort reports, video evidence and 911 calls — available to anyone, with the ease of one-click shopping. And so there'due south the state's strange geography: swampland infested with alligators and pythons, the most sinkholes in the nation. Every bit for law and order, the state counts about 2 1000000 curtained weapons permits, 1.4 million felons, and "stand up 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 accept noted, the water table of weirdness is just naturally high in Florida. Strangeness seems to bubble to the surface.

The perfect Florida Man tweet always seemed to get at the state's reputation for being, as comedian John Mulaney said on an episode of "Belatedly Night With Seth Meyers," "the Costco of upsetting people. … It's simply everything at once." Campion's funniest tweets seemed to pile one gag, or clickable keyword, on acme of some other, like a Marx Brothers routine. "Other states accept rut, lax gun laws, lack of regulation — fifty-fifty alligators — only not all at once," says Campion. As an example, he singles out a Floridian who was arrested for illegal foraging. "Then you lot find out he's foraging for magic mushrooms," Campion says. "That probably wouldn't happen in Minnesota. And he's on magic mushrooms. And then they open up his backpack and there'southward a baby alligator in it. Any one detail isn't a big deal. But combine them: That's a Florida Man story."

The success of Florida Human parallels the rise of smartphone video, and a generation of people "trying to become viral in their own little networks," says Campion, "and then it working likewise well." He points to the Florida Men who filmed their pranks, went viral and then got arrested for, say, riding manatees (they're endangered) or throwing an alligator through a Wendy'due south drive-through (creature cruelty). Not to mention digital freak-prove pranksters similar Alisha Hessler, a.k.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 because, as before long every bit he launched the account, it took on a life of its own. At first, he was just thrilled to get direct letters "from cool people on Twitter." Then spoof news sites and clone accounts popped up, screen-grabbing his tweets. A subreddit exploded to over one-half a million members. All over the Cyberspace, sites began doing "best Florida Homo" listicles. Journalists began sliding into his DMs and pitching him their stories, thirsty for retweets. In 2014, Seth Meyers began hosting a belatedly-night "Fake or Florida" trivia quiz.

In the starting time, Campion had to rewrite headlines from local criminal offense blotters. But before 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 arrive in Florida — a country that ranks third in UFO sightings — they could tell a pop history through the fashion the Florida Man virus grafted itself onto other trending topics: "Florida homo shoots at Pokémon Go players outside 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 it'southward okay."

When Campion's Twitter account hitting the front page of the New York Times in May 2015, "Volume agents were DM-ing me, telling me if I write a i-paragraph treatment they tin sell it that afternoon," he says. "Just I didn't want to write a toilet book."

By 2016, Campion began to worry. At this point, he says, he realized his little face-tattooed male child had grown upward and left him behind. Soon, Campion was noticing that, while people were notwithstanding sharing harmless or satirical tales, "90 percent of the stories people were sending me were hateful-spirited."

Moreover, as cash-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 criminal offense stories, at minimal expense, and with relatively little legwork. Since Florida Human being is cheap news, and his search-engine-optimized popularity is self-reinforcing, he's more likely to be shared than some random Kansas Man. At present Florida Human seems to take become the whole Internet'due south local news.

Initially, the account was like Florida Man Mack Yearwood, who posted his "Wanted" photo on Facebook, never suspecting it would lead to his arrest. "If I was to first this whole thing again, I'd be thinking about it in a very unlike fashion, considering now we recollect nearly the Internet in a different fashion," Campion says. The large deviation is that, "in 2013, nosotros didn't recollect what happened on the Net could touch real life."

Like many of us, Campion gradually became more aware of social media's existent-earth consequences and downsides: election interference, Net bullying and privacy concerns, for starters. He saw the manner the Florida Man meme immortalized even misdemeanors and seemed to overlap with the pay-to-redact mug shot publication manufacture, which the American Bar Association has dubbed an "online extortion scheme" and which Florida only recently regulated, in July 2018 (though many newspapers still host for-profit, ad-supported microsites devoted entirely to searchable mug shot databases). Campion besides began to worry that Florida Homo reinforced the simplistic proficient-cops-and-bad-robbers narratives of reality amusement like "Cops" and "Live PD," and cutting against the grain of movements like Black Lives Matter.

In 2017, Campion briefly stopped posting to the account. The one-act felt stale, just he was also request himself, " 'How much practise I want to be a political party to essentially making fun of people on the worst solar day of their lives, even if they have washed something incorrect?' Like, who gave the Internet the correct to add to someone's punishment?" After a several-month hiatus, Campion returned to the Twitter account, adamant to "steer it in a better direction." He began alternate funny tweets with social-justice petitions and news stories about police corruption and reform. After piddling more than than a smattering of retweets and signatures from his near one-half-one thousand thousand followers, he decided that @_FloridaMan should meet the fate that greets then many in Florida: This March, he marked the account "RETIRED."

Florida Human is a microcosm of the fashion and then many of united states of america are struggling with the ethics of how to acquit on the Internet, and how easily an ironic joke, multiplied by millions of shares, tin can begin to feel like freak-show mockery or viral cyberbullying. As isolated jokes, Florida Man riffs seem harmless enough; in aggregate it feels as if they've go part 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 Human "doesn't do dark and overly morbid things" — to no avail. Craig Pittman, writer 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 case, I won't postal service the story."

Campion says he hopes people, as he is, are learning to exist more responsible about what they share online, but he doesn't seem too optimistic. With the air of a disappointed father who loves his wayward son but doesn't know how to help him, Campion adds, "I'd still love to see Florida Man accept a happy ending."

For now, some Florida Men are taking matters into their own easily, figuring they shouldn't be the but ones who aren't profiting off the meme — similar Lawrence Sullivan, who tattooed his unabridged face to await like the Joker from "The Dark Knight," and has been releasing disturbing shock-rap videos, or Charles McDowell, who went viral in the fall. Propelled to infamy by an Escambia Canton Sheriff's Office "Wheel of Fugitives" Boob tube segment, McDowell was mocked relentlessly for his extremely thick cervix. 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 ane.3 million Instagram followers, including DJ Khaled and Snoop Dogg, and teamed up with scrawny white YouTuber Daddy Long Neck for the goofy racial-harmony-and-babes music video "All Necks Matter," which scored over 10 million views across platforms. Afterward McDowell's recent rearrest, his management posted, "He volition exist out in the Neckst 4-6 months."

Recently, the storm of controversy over Florida Homo has been upgraded to perhaps a Category 4, afterwards a loftier-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 Homo" with "Man Likely Suffering From Mental Illness or Drug Addiction." On Facebook, the otherwise sunny page Experience Good Florida has been pushing the hashtag #deathtofloridaman. It seems Florida Homo is, to quote a Batman moving-picture show, one of those heroes who lives long enough to become a villain. Or possibly, similar Brandon Hatfield, he can exist an instructive example: a focal point for a conversation about what nosotros're doing when we share funny news on the Net.

Any such conversation, withal, has to account for the redemptive side of Florida Man — the simple fact that a lot of people don't just mock him as a villain or exploit him as a victim. Ii of Reddit's 10 most popular Florida Man stories are actually exposés of law abuse, including "Florida Homo arrested for possession of laundry detergent — non heroin — among 11 freed afterward deputy allegedly faked drug tests." What'due south more, many Floridians embrace their native son as an information technology-coulda-been-me populist hero, standing up for the country's stubborn strangeness. In Tampa, Cigar City Brewing has named its Florida Homo IPA after "a hero who's forgotten more most amateur taxidermy and alligator rasslin' than you'll e'er know." In Miami, a drag performer named Florida Homo has gone viral for performing an Ariana Grande hit in a Voldemort costume. In Orlando, there's been a Florida Man Music Festival and a "Florida Man" one-man play. In Tampa, a tour guide leads Florida Man walking (and drinking) tours, and writer Tyler Gillespie has published an empathetic book of poems about Florida Man, including ane inspired by his own DUI.

In Jacksonville, Mike Alancourt, a white-bearded, 43-year-old teacher's assistant, went viral this winter as "Florida homo wins the internet with hip-hop dance routine." He concluded up on "The Ellen DeGeneres Prove" and in an official Mail Malone music video, and though he describes himself equally "technically the antithesis of Florida Man … a gay bearded hippie who belongs in Seattle," he's since embraced the characterization. "I can't necessarily get with everything Florida Man has done, simply I get with the part that says nosotros should all be who we are," he says. "That little chip of weird you lot have? Florida Man says: Embrace information technology. The redeeming quality of Florida Man is he don't give a f—."

"If I was to first this whole thing again, I'd be thinking about information technology in a very unlike way, considering at present nosotros recall about the Net in a dissimilar way," says Freddie Campion, founder of the @_FloridaMan Twitter account. The big difference is that, "in 2013, nosotros didn't retrieve what happened on the Internet could affect real life."

Per Google Trends data, the meme has never been more popular. Particularly in his abode state, many people pass up the thought that Florida Man should be Internet-canceled. Since he's on the verge of condign an unofficial state mascot, it's appropriately absurd that the proper way to honor him is being seriously debated past Jacksonville'south goofy minor-league baseball squad, the Jumbo Shrimp. In late July, the team will host a Florida Homo Night, featuring a jorts-clad Florida Man bobblehead, a operation by at least i bodily Florida Homo and the breaking of "weird Florida laws." The night'southward advertizement sponsor is the constabulary offices of John M. Phillips, an attorney who says he'due south become "Florida Human being every bit a lawyer."

It's non but because Phillips has represented a Florida Man who shot off his own penis, and 5 Florida Women — in separate instances — who were run over by vehicles while sunbathing on the embankment. Online, you can find a clip of Phillips on "Let'due south Make a Deal," dressed upwards like Alexander Hamilton as he wins a Sea-Doo watercraft. He has sued Trayvon Martin'southward killer, George Zimmerman, defended a human being who fabricated Super Bowl-inspired "Left Shark" figurines against copyright claims by Katy Perry, and represented Omarosa Manigault Newman.

Phillips understands the contradictions of Florida Man more than most. He grew up in Alabama and hung a Amalgamated flag in his white fraternity's dorm room. "Everything changed for me," he says, when he represented the family unit of Jordan Davis, the unarmed black teenager murdered by a white human being, Michael Dunn. As Phillips explains in a TEDxJacksonville talk, the case caused him to reconsider his racial privilege and reorient his career around civil rights.

I ask Phillips the obvious question: How can y'all celebrate the meme's comical side, knowing that it as well makes light of horrific crimes? "I would never telephone call Michael Dunn a Florida Man, considering Michael Dunn was a murderer, and to associate him with Florida Man minimizes what he did," says Phillips carefully. Then he sighs and concedes: "Merely that's how the article would be written: 'Florida Man flees after shooting three teenagers, claiming Stand Your Ground.' "

Phillips says he recognizes that the joke often isn't funny, "because of the mental health problems and drug dependency that do sometimes crusade the quote-unquote Florida Homo syndrome." He cites the problems facing military veterans and the homeless, the opioid epidemic and the country'due south most concealed bear gun permits. "In the Gunshine State," he says, "Florida Man can turn on you real quick." He knows the meme is messy and oftentimes offensive and cruel. But he too thinks Florida Man can be admirable. With lawyerly precision, he defines Florida Man every bit a person who embodies "free-spirited recklessness" and "doesn't put other people in harm'due south way."

"There'due south a level of Florida Human being in all of us," Phillips says. "The question is how you channel it."

Idue south it okay to laugh at Florida Man? In the comedy business organization, the answer to such a question is ever an unsatisfying "It depends." When you're joking virtually real people, it mostly depends on whether you're laughing at someone, in a dehumanizing kind of way, or if you're laughing with someone — often considering, even (or especially) in their worst moment, they remind you of yourself. The in one case-absurdist Florida Man meme has undoubtedly curdled into callous jokes at the expense of the vulnerable. But plenty of people laugh with Florida Human being, knowing how easy information technology is to become one. Ultimately, many of these stories aren't as boggling as the headlines; they just have that one odd detail — or one memorable mug shot — that, if spun correctly, might turn one person'due south DUI into another'south LOL.

Like a lot of memes, Florida Human's popularity doesn't exactly prove or disprove the inherent wisdom of the crowd so much as it highlights our collective contradictions. Nosotros similar to cheer on the underdog and revel in someone else's pain. Nosotros savour mocking and empathizing with the unfortunate, partly because clickbait-or-bust social media is essentially built to multiply one superficial behavioral farthermost or the other.

So when the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp planned their Florida Man nighttime, they looked for a family-friendly mascot who represented the best of Florida Man without dragging along the worst of his luggage: a Floridian who hadn't hurt anyone, who wasn't being exploited, and who was happy to have people express mirth along with him. They establish Lane Pittman, a multiple-time Florida Man who rallies the crowd at Jacksonville Jaguars NFL games, waving flags and firing T-shirt cannons every bit part of the Jax Pack hype team.

At the Jumbo Shrimp's Florida Human being Dark, Pittman volition play the national canticle on electric guitar because, the first time he went viral, he was "Florida human arrested later playing national anthem on July 4." In the video seen everywhere from BuzzFeed to Fox News, Pittman, wearing jorts and an American flag tank tiptop, shreds like Hendrix on a Neptune Embankment sidewalk until hundreds of people gather around and he is arrested for obstructing traffic.

"I was like: This is American as crap! Freedom, baby!" Pittman reminisces. "I had everybody dabbing me upward, high-fiving me. I had one one-time lady osculation me on the face. And then two cops came over."

The second time he went viral, he uploaded a nine-second video of himself — no shirt, no shoes, merely lath shorts — headbanging and holding an American flag against the torrential air current and rain of 2016'southward Hurricane Matthew, to the blare of Slayer'south "Raining Blood." The video was viewed nearly iv million 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'southward 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 hair is wearing jorts and an American flag tank top — what he calls "my Hurricane Lane persona." Amid the roar of speed metal, Pittman hypes up fans at a popular-upwardly advertising space, where a long line of autograph seekers await on members of Korn and Evanescence.

Pittman'due south hurricane videos accept become a hurricane-season YouTube ritual — a rain dance in defiance of the weather condition. In some means, the original video is — like frozen Florida orangish juice — the about full-bodied and syrupy example of what it means to be a Florida Man: a wild homo who stands business firm against propriety, the forces that threaten to destroy this strange paradise, and mutual sense itself.

Pittman's career path equally a professionalized Florida Man began in high school, when he was elected class clown. He honed his theatrics while working a $10-an-hour gig equally a roadside sign spinner with Big Guy Moving, Velcroed into a muscle adjust in the xc-degree oestrus. These days, Pittman, who fronts a metal ring and does social media consulting, is the almost clean-cut Florida Man you tin can imagine, despite existence a metalhead icon embraced by Slayer. He doesn't curse or drink. He's a devout youth leader of his Baptist church building, an assistant lacrosse omnibus and a substitute music teacher who asks to "anoint information technology up real quick" before eating his egg biscuit at Starbucks. He embraces the mantle 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 want to be his friend!"

Listening to Pittman, I can't aid but call up 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 data and connection is making united states of america less empathetic toward people nosotros see and meet online, and I suspect that it'south only going to get worse. Given how chop-chop falsehoods spread online, I ask Pittman if it bothers him that people probably do confuse the existent Florida with the meme.

In between selfies with fans, Pittman brushes back his sweaty hair and tells me that his take on Florida Man and the Net is simpler, and more optimistic: Every land has its idiots, criminals and problems; it'southward unfair that his home country takes so much flak. Simply people generally know what's right. And, besides, information technology's not going to finish him, or whatsoever other Florida Man, from acting crazy if they experience like it.

"People throw shade at Florida. Like, a lot." A brief cloud passes over his upbeat mood, and so the Florida Human being smiles. "But you lot tin't put shade on u.s.a.. We're the Sunshine State!"

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 before version of this story incorrectly stated that Florida's sunshine laws were passed in 1995. They were passed in 1967 and amended in 1995. Information technology also incorrectly called Jack Daniel'due south a bourbon. It is a Tennessee whiskey.

Credits: Story past Logan Hill. Designed by Michael Johnson. Illustrated by Peter Arkle.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/15/feature/is-it-okay-to-laugh-at-florida-man-2/

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