‘Florida Man’ is a real thing, in fact and in fiction | Opinion
In the 2024 race for the White House, the campaign trail’s presence of not just one but two Florida residents — thus far — has triggered a resurgence of the popular meme known as Florida Man.
Google the term “Florida Man,” and you’ll get 1.4 trillion results in less than a minute. Google “Miami Mayor Francis Suarez,” and in less than a minute you’ll get results suggesting that we may not have a third presidential candidate from Florida after all.
The Florida Man meme first became a thing 10 years ago with the launch of a Twitter feed dubbed @FloridaMan. The keepers of the feed dutifully compiled news reports, mostly about crimes, in which the circumstances were weird, Florida style.
That same year Reddit, a reader-edited website, added to the meme’s popularity, but also posted some guidelines: “’Florida Man Decapitates Baby’ is not funny. We’re looking for more of a ‘Naked Florida Man, High on Meth, Tries to Rob Liquor Store with a Dead Stingray.’”
Will the next Twitter feed read “Authorities in Texas and California investigate Florida Man for luring job-seeking migrants onto planes bound for Martha’s Vineyard and California?” It’s also not funny, but it’s gaining prosecutorial momentum in San Antonio and Sacramento.
Meanwhile, it’s only fair to mention that long before improvements on the internet allowed services such as Twitter and Reddit to emerge and waste the time of millions of America’s young people, two Florida residents had laid a foundation for the widespread belief that Florida is weird. Very weird.
No, I’m not referring to the two presidential candidates. One of them, a Mr. D.J. Trump of Palm Beach, is a former New Yorker and a relatively recent migrant to the Sunshine State. Even so, his conduct often fits into the Florida Man meme. The other candidate, Florida native R. Dion DeSantis, is already widely recognized as a quintessential Florida Man.
However, it was two other Florida residents who arguably were the real culprits.
Coincidentally, both of these culprits were writers who had a lengthy association with an influential Florida institution that is notorious for happily stirring up trouble by speaking truth to power: the Miami Herald.
One, Carl Hiaasen, is a Fort Lauderdale native who not only wrote countless columns for the Herald before retiring in 2021, but also writes best-selling books. Two, “Striptease” and “Hoot,” were made into movies.
“Hoot” is safe for viewing by kids — unless a Moms for Liberty crusader objects. “Hoot” nicely reflects Hiaasen’s views on Florida’s endangered natural environment, which the movie beautifully displays.
In “Hoot” and many of his other works, Hiaasen uses his sense of humor to lament the state’s frantic pace of growth and poke fun at the corrupt pols who sell out the public in exchange for bribes, campaign contributions and consulting contracts.
A less acerbic form of humor can be found in the prolific Dave Barry’s output, the other Herald writer who has made full use of zany Florida. While Hiaasen uses satirical humor to prompt readers to think about important issues, Barry mostly uses his form of humor to make people laugh — and then think “Why am I laughing at this?”
A native New Yorker, Barry moved to Miami 40 years ago to take a job as a humor columnist for Tropic, then the Herald’s Sunday magazine. His syndicated columns reached a nationwide audience, spreading far and wide the perception of Florida as a place where strange things are everyday occurrences..
Barry’s early writing often reflected the experiences of many northerners whose move to a state with a semi-tropical climate placed them in close proximity to scary creatures, from alligators in their swimming pools to giant palmetto bugs in their kitchens.
Through the years, Barry broadened the scope of his commentary beyond the fish-out-of-water challenges faced by Florida’s newer residents. The state’s goofy elements were reflected well in “Big Trouble,” a movie based on his book of the same name.
Last Saturday, during a CBS news segment plugging Barry’s latest book, “Swamp Story,” the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and CBS’ Jeff Glor discussed the book during an airboat trip into the Everglades.
Amid the laughs about Florida’s status as a never-depleted source of fodder for humorists, Barry acknowledged that some of the themes in his new novel were drawn from painful chapters in his own personal life, including his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s suicide.
Humor, it seems, is sometimes a way to deal with life’s problems, so maybe the Florida Man meme’s current resurgence in popularity tells us less about the state of Florida than it does about the state of our nation and our own lives.
Indeed, within the thousands of amusing anecdotes portraying Florida Man as a bumbling crook or a hapless would-be superhero, there’s often an undercurrent of empathy for the miscreant, along with wondering whether it was desperation, delusions, drugs or something in the water that led a particular Florida Man to do something so incredibly weird.
