The thought got here to Pete Melfi, a radio persona turned podcaster in St. Augustine, Fla., final yr after he organized “the laziest race in the history of races,” a .5-kilometer beer run, and the members had a grand outdated time.
Wouldn’t it’s enjoyable, Mr. Melfi thought, to carry one other race, this time with an enormous after-party? And what if the theme was none aside from the meme that launched many 1000’s of headlines about his house state: Florida Man?
His wild concept morphed into an all-day competitors with a sequence of zany occasions: A mullet contest. A “mud duel” with pool noodles. An “evading arrest” impediment course, with actual sheriff’s deputies pursuing the contestants. (However, to be clear, there have been no precise arrests within the race. {The handcuffs} got here from a intercourse toy store.)
“We understand that Florida is weird,” Mr. Melfi stated. “We embrace it.”
If the remainder of the nation — hell, the remainder of the world — goes to make Florida the punchline, then those that name it house may as nicely be in on the joke. Don’t overthink it.
However Florida Man has been a cultural phenomenon for therefore lengthy that some in Florida and past have spent fairly a little bit of time eager about what it means, methods to problem it and what it says concerning the state’s identification. Perhaps the video games in St. Augustine may be an excuse to discover the evolution of the meme — and of Florida itself.
“Florida has always been, to me, such an important barometer of where the nation is headed,” stated Julio Capó Jr., a historian at Florida Worldwide College in Miami, who has written that viewing the state and its people “in caricature form” is a centuries-old habit. “Yet there are very few attempts to take the state seriously — to understand its past, its present and much less its future.”
On the peak of the meme’s reputation, within the mid to late 2010s, everybody, it appeared, mocked outlandish and unfortunate tales fished from the state’s bottomless trove of police reviews and mug pictures. The @_FloridaMan account on Twitter, now often known as X, attracted a whole bunch of 1000’s of followers. The Florida Man Birthday Problem inspired individuals to enter their beginning date and “Florida Man” to see what weird headline that revealed on their birthday popped up.
However questions quickly arose about thrusting common individuals into the tough public glare, particularly in the event that they had been affected by habit, psychological sickness or poverty. Different states had freakish incidents, too — if fewer involving alligators. Why decide on Florida?
The author Lauren Groff, who moved to the state 18 years in the past, recalled one other Florida meme, by which somebody saws the dangling state off the map.
“It’s a giant and incredibly complex state that has been reduced to something deeply silly,” she stated.
The prevailing principle for a way Florida Man turned fashionable goes like this: The absurdity of the state’s 2000 presidential recount turned Florida into the butt of late-night jokes. The state’s robust public-records legal guidelines made it straightforward for anybody to acquire police reviews. The web and social media exploded it right into a sensation.
However Ira P. Robbins, a regulation professor at American College, found in 2021 that different states had simply as broad or broader entry to public information than Florida. “Why don’t we have New Mexico Man or New York Man or Massachusetts Man?” he stated in an interview.
Craig Pittman, the creator of “Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country,” famous that Florida has produced bizarre information since earlier than it turned a state in 1845. “When we were a territory, we were known as a rogues’ paradise,” he stated. “Half the people were scalawags and robbers, and the other half were their penniless victims.”
However now, many newspapers have stopped publishing mug pictures. The proprietor of the @_FloridaMan account retired it in 2019, citing unease with mocking individuals’s conduct on what is commonly one of many worst days of their lives. In his publication highlighting oddball tales from across the state, Mr. Pittman doesn’t embody any about Floridians who’ve been involuntarily dedicated for psychiatric care or who’re clearly affected by habit.
But none of this has spelled the top of Florida Man. The phrase has entered the political lexicon, remodeling from a generic time period for a nonpublic individual — Florida Man as John Doe — to a stand-in for former President Donald J. Trump. “Florida Man Makes Announcement,” The New York Submit riffed in 2022, when Mr. Trump declared his re-election marketing campaign.
Whereas that exact Florida Man lives in a gilded Palm Seaside compound, common Floridians do face actual struggles that outsiders, together with some who’ve flocked to the state in recent times, could not grasp, stated Tyler Gillespie, a author in St. Petersburg. Their perspective is, “‘We can kind of do whatever we want and we can leave,’” he stated of the newcomers.
“My family’s here, so I’m pretty rooted,” Mr. Gillespie stated. “But there’s hardly anywhere affordable to live.”
Incongruous as it could appear, St. Augustine, the place Mr. Melfi lives and arranged the Florida Man Video games, is the oldest repeatedly settled metropolis within the nation and a spot steeped in historical past.
The primary-ever Florida Man Video games had been held on the fairgrounds of a historic district, with tickets going for $55 a pop on Saturday. Sponsored by a Florida attire firm and others, together with a automotive dealership and a gymnasium, the competitors awarded $5,000 to at least one successful workforce, primarily based on its efficiency in occasions all through the day.
Tons of of individuals got here to revel within the laid-back Florida-ness of all of it. Shirtless overalls. “Merica” hats. Mullets! Overthinking they weren’t — nor was this reporter, as soon as she settled in to observe.
A workforce from north of Tampa, the Pink Eyed Gator Huggers, introduced a mascot: a 5-year-old inexperienced iguana named Mikey. “What’s more Florida than a stinkin’ iguana?” stated C.J. Mays, Mikey’s proprietor, as she petted its again.
Contestants wolfed down an enormous pile of pork utilizing their naked arms. “Everything I do is for Florida and America!” Dylan Mullaney of Jacksonville exclaimed as he consumed.
Girls wearing pinup type competed for the title of “Florida Ma’am,” together with one sporting seltzer cans as hair rollers. Organizers had been pressured to improvise for the mud duel after somebody “slashed” the plastic pool by which it was to happen, Mr. Melfi stated.
“I heard they had New York plates on their car,” he joked about whoever was accountable.
The shenanigans had been made for Instagram and TikTok, the platforms that unfold phrase concerning the occasion within the first place. The emcee was a TikTok personality. One of many groups featured a man known for holding a big American flag as a hurricane blew in.
Among the many rivals — all of them males, most of them white — was Joshua Barr, a 37-year-old from Citrus County, whose three-person workforce was named the Cooter Commandos, in homage to a neighborhood river turtle. Every workforce member created an over-the-top persona to advertise the workforce on social media. Mr. Ryan’s was Captain Cooter, “based off early ’90s wrestling, W.W.E., a little bit of ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage,” he stated. To compete, he wore a flashy tank prime and cutoffs.
“You’ve got to lean into the joke and lean into the absurdity of it,” he stated.
Mr. Ryan’s Florida, he stated, concerned rising up driving his bicycle and being in nature. One in all his workforce members has been his good friend since first grade.
In recent times, plenty of new individuals have moved into Citrus County, on the state’s west central coast, he stated, stirring some resentment amongst locals who “don’t want Northerners moving there — they want things to stay how they are.”
“We’re, like, just getting our first Chick-fil-A and Target and Starbucks,” he stated.
Mandy Millam, 37, whose husband was additionally one of many Cooters, stated individuals from exterior of the state nonetheless misunderstand it too usually.
“Florida has a wild heart,” she stated. “We have wild nature. But people perceive us as having wild abandon. We don’t cross that line as much as people think we do.”
She added: “I love this place so much.”
