Florida Man: why the joke became the map of GTA 6

In the first GTA 6 trailer, from December 2023, the game turns into a social media feed. An alligator gets pulled out of a backyard pool, an older man in a G-string waters his garden, a street party streams live. One of the accounts posting is called PlanetLeonidaMan.

Nobody had to say Florida. The press quickly tied several scenes to viral videos shot there and to the Florida Man archetype. Leonida is the game's Florida-inspired state, and Vice City its Miami-inspired city. "Only in Leonida" opens one of the trailer's posts and names a section of the official site whose tagline reads: "Tour a few of the must-see destinations across the sunshine state." Sunshine State, as it happens, is Florida's nickname. The map was drawn, in a sense, on top of a joke the internet has been telling for more than a decade. So what are we laughing at?

A headline that became a genre

Florida Man, as Dictionary.com defines it, is slang for someone who commits bizarre or idiotic crimes associated with Florida, and it grew out of headlines that identify the perpetrator only as "Florida Man." A Twitter account devoted to the character went viral in 2013. Part of the explanation for the steady supply is the state's public records law, which puts police reports and mug shots within easy reach of newsrooms.

The meme has a less funny side. Reason magazine points out that behind the headlines are real people, many of them in the middle of mental health crises or struggling with drugs. In 2019, the account's creator retired it and told the Washington Post that at one point he had asked himself how much he wanted to take part in mocking people on the worst day of their lives.

Freud and the joke with a target

Freud devoted a whole book to this in 1905, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In it, he separates the harmless joke, an end in itself, from the tendentious joke, which serves an aim, chiefly a hostile or an obscene one.

The hostile joke is born of a renunciation: once violence is banned and even name-calling is frowned upon, what remains is to recruit a third person against the enemy. By making the other small, low, contemptible and comic, we get the pleasure of beating them by a detour, and the laughter of the third person, who did no work at all, certifies the victory. The joke slips past the inhibition and reopens a pleasure that had become inaccessible.

In one of his most uncomfortable examples, a well-crafted joke gets sensitive adults, who long ago unlearned laughing at physical defects, to laugh at a historian's red hair like schoolboys. Elsewhere, Freud concedes the point outright, in A. A. Brill's 1916 translation: "Strictly speaking, we do not know what we are laughing about."

Three seats in a headline

Freud usually counts three people in a tendentious joke: the one who makes it, the target and the listener. And the one who laughs is not the author but the listener, who just sat there.

In a Florida Man headline, the newsroom or the meme account takes the first seat, the person in the mug shot the second, and the rest of us, me included, the third. Nobody, Freud writes, is content to have made a joke just for himself, and the urge to pass it on often runs right over serious objections. Today that urge has its own button: share.

But the listener only laughs if they carry the same inhibitions the joke has just overcome in the teller: laughing at the same jokes, Freud says, is proof of a far-reaching psychical agreement. And the pleasure bribes the listener into taking our side without close scrutiny. The laugh seals a complicity between the first and third persons, and the bill goes to the second, who never learns they became the joke.

Laughing from inside, laughing from outside

The tendentious joke, Freud notes, has a special fondness for attacking those above; when it seems aimed at wretched, powerless people, he suspects it is, as the proverb goes, beating the sack while aiming at the donkey. And it finds an especially favorable case when the criticism targets a collective the speaker belongs to, as in Jewish jokes told by Jews. Jokes made up by outsiders, he says, are mostly brutal farces that skip the work of the joke, because to an outsider the target is already a comic figure.

Florida Man fits at both ends. Told by Floridians, it can be self-irony: in 2019, novelist Tim Dorsey wrote in Newsweek, "We need Florida Man. Because if we don't laugh, we'll cry." Told from outside, the word Florida is enough. And Leonida? The trailer frames those scenes as posts, down to a livestream whose comment feed, in PC Gamer's words, "mirrors reality, in the sense that none of the comments are very useful or illustrative of anything." My reading: if there is a donkey in this satire, it is not in the picture. It is in the feed, and in whoever is scrolling it.

When Florida Man is you

But GTA 6 is not a feed. In the same trailer, Lucia appears in prison scrubs, and the video ends with her and Jason storming a roadside store, guns drawn, past a sign on the door that reads "We will no longer accept cash stored in underwear." The protagonists are exactly the kind of people who make headlines in Leonida, and the one holding the controller is you.

That is where the joke changes shape. Facing the meme, we sit in the third seat, the one who laughs without effort. In Leonida, the game puts the player in the second, the one starring in the headline. Plenty of people will keep laughing at the extras, and that is fine. But by Freud's measure, self-irony makes for better jokes than the outsider's farce, and the game leaves that door open.

The next time one of those headlines lands on your phone, before you forward it, there is the question Freud left hanging in 1905: what, exactly, are you laughing at? And would you tell the same joke with the person in the photo sitting across from you?