Gatorland received a brief mention on national television this weekend during the Weekend Update segment of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” The bit also involved a shirtless Pete Buttigieg and ended up as a Florida joke.
The longtime Orlando attraction was part of a riff off the news item read by Weekend Update co-anchor Colin Jost: Some people in the Democratic Party want to move the first presidential primary election from Iowa to South Carolina.
“But why move it to another boring state?” Jost asked. “Start the primaries with a bang in Florida, right? Instead of watching a politician eat a corn dog at the Iowa State Fair, imagine Pete Buttigieg smoking meth, shirtless, at Gatorland as he battles for the state’s key demographic, grandmas under 30.”
The joke was accompanied with a doctored image of Buttigieg, the U.S. secretary of transportation and former presidential candidate, with a pipe and an alligator in front of a sign with the Gatorland logo and its “alligator capital of the world” slogan.
“At the end of the day,” Jost concluded, “Florida may not give us FDR or JFK, but it will definitely give us HPV.”
Mark McHugh, president and CEO of Gatorland, took the Weekend Update reference in stride.
“I’ve been a fan of ‘SNL’ since the 1970s,” he said. “While I don’t always agree with their political sense of humor — particularly when taking shots at Florida, which is by far the greatest state in the union — it is always nice to see that when people think of Florida, they think of the park that embodies the love, humor and down-home hospitality of our beautiful state.”
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