What Makes a Chuck Norris Joke Kick?

Chuck Norris has died, but his presence will live on—not in the way that, say, Jimi Hendrix or Emily Dickinson will endure through music or poetry—but through a means that Jimi, Emily, and most people throughout history never knew because it came into existence only a few decades ago: the internet meme.

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He’s Back—and Back Again

Cats are said to have nine lives. Chuck Norris had at least three, including one that will persist after his passing.

Back in the early 1970s, he appeared as—brace yourself—a villain in The Way of the Dragon, starring Bruce Lee. After appearing in a half-dozen or so forgotten films, he picked up steam in the 1980s, starring as the hero of movies such as Missing in Action and The Delta Force. His second life came in the 1990s when he turned to television, starring in Walker, Texas Ranger for several seasons.

His third life is the most interesting, if you ask me.

The 1990s brought a new opportunity to budding comics. For millennia, amateur wiseguys had limited audiences for their wisecracks: their buddies, their long-suffering wives and girlfriends, and innocent children. (Just ask the poor Canada children.). Then, as if gifted from above, came the internet. Now they—OK, we—had a vast, largely unregulated venue to use in the relentless search for a receptive audience.

During these early years of the Internet, specifically 2005, a guy you probably have never heard of, Ian Spector, launched an internet sensation. “I was just a teenager who had a website on a random little domain name,” Spector explained in an article on Today. After encountering an Internet forum with jokes about the actor Vin Diesel, Spector set out to aggregate the facts. “I never expected any of this to ever take off, right?” he said. “Like I posted a link in a forum once and the next morning, there were 10,000 hits, and [it] grew from there.”

Spector made one other contribution, and this one just might be the secret to the sensation. He gave users a chance to choose a different person to be the star of the jokes—and so Chuck Norris became immortal. No, wait, he already was, of course. I mean, he’s Chuck Norris.

Now He’s Everywhere

Spector, a high school student playing around on the web, was, as Ryan Hockensmith put it in an article for ESPN, “about to become one of the internet’s first meme kingmakers.”

“Chuck Norris Facts,” as the jokes became known, went viral.

The phenomenon outgrew the internet. Spector published five books of Chuck Norris Facts, and he wasn’t alone. Someone else—someone more famous, more powerful, more everything—came out with a book featuring similar lines. His name was—you guessed it—Chuck Norris. (Of course, he came out with a book to go along his movies, his TV show, and his internet celebrity status. He’s Chuck Norris.)

I remember buying a poster full of these jokes for my son when he was a kid. I don’t remember which “Facts” were on this poster, but it’s easy to find them on the internet. Here are just a few of the many that have emerged over the years:

The flu has to get a Chuck Norris shot once a year.

When the boogeyman goes to sleep at night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

Ghosts tell Chuck Norris stories at the campfire.

Chuck Norris has to sleep with the lights on because the dark is afraid of him.

A bulletproof vest wears Chuck Norris for protection.

In an emergency, Chuck Norris doesn’t call 911 . . . 911 calls Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris doesn’t turn on the shower, he stares at it until it starts to cry.

Chuck Norris can start a fire by rubbing two ice cubes together.

Chuck Norris can do a wheelie on a unicycle.

Chuck Norris can fold a fitted sheet.

Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

Chuck Norris likes his meat so rare he only eats unicorns.

MC Hammer learned the hard way that Chuck Norris can touch this.

Chuck Norris once won an underwater breathing contest with a fish.

When Chuck Norris does a push-up, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.

When Chuck Norris enters a room, he doesn’t turn the lights on. He turns the dark off.

Chuck Norris can divide by zero.

Chuck Norris counted to infinity—twice.

. . . and one of my all-time favorites:

Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch. He decides what time it is.

The Anatomy of a Chuck Norris Joke

Look, I’m no expert on Chuck Norris the man, his career, even on martial arts. I’m not even a fan, really. Having learned a bit about some of his public remarks, I think we disagreed on a few things.

“Chuck Norris Facts,” however, have little to do with any of these things, even the man. Instead, they are a form of literature—not great literature, mind you—but language crafted to create an effect, and that’s what I want to discuss here: the way these quirky little memes work.

Many of these jokes have something in common, and it’s part of the key to their humor. They suggest that Chuck Norris is larger than life. (I know, I know, of course he is. He’s Chuck Norris.) We can imagine all kinds of people who exceed the limits of human strength, prowess, stature, and the like: that’s essentially the definition of a superhero. But many Chuck Norris jokes are a little different. Their humor is due in part, I think, to a combination of things: the nature of his prowess, the crazy impossibility of his abilities, the way they tap into common knowledge, and the creative way these things are expressed. Not every joke contains all of these elements, but several contain more than one.

Let’s take, for example, the last few on the list above. Counting to infinity is not only impossible by definition, but just weird, at least when it comes to superpowers. Most heroes and superheroes, from Achilles to Wonder Woman, are remarkable for their physical or mental abilities, not because they can count to infinity, turn the dark off, or decide the time. Still, the ability to do such things, well, that’s impressive. (I especially covet his ability to decide the time. I could be so much more productive if I could turn back the clock whenever I wanted. I’m going to work on this one.)

One of my favorite aspects of some Chuck Norris jokes is the way they call on our shared knowledge, not only of pop culture (as in the example of the MC Hammer reference), but even of how the world works. We all learned a long time ago, in math class, that no one can count to infinity or divide by zero, and many of us have discovered, through painful experience, how hard it is to fold a fitted sheet.

This last ability definitely counts as a superpower, Chuck Norris shares this one with one other human being: Martha Stewart. On that note, let me address the Chuck Norris in the room. Yes, as others have noted, some of the Facts have more than a whiff—a fresh and fragrant one, mind you—of machismo, something that Spector himself worries may have fostered the growth of toxic masculinity. Let’s be clear, though, not all masculinity is toxic; some of it can just be funny. Besides, the superpowers in some of the funniest Chuck Norris jokes are not peculiar to men at all. I would admire anyone who could divide by zero. I kind of wish I could.

Because several of the jokes center on commonly known facts, they quickly resonate and perfectly align with the pretended superstatus of Chuck Norris (which itself becomes part of the common knowledge once the meme is sufficiently widely known). That’s often how humor works, by the way. If you like sitcoms such as Seinfeld and, one of my favorites, Taxi, you may have noticed that the reason you laugh usually, maybe even 80 or 90 percent of the time, is that something that George or Louie says or does aligns perfectly with what you expect him to say or do. Such was the case with one of TV’s greatest sitcoms, featuring one TV’s greatest comedians: I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball. You know how George, Louie, and Lucy (and Maude and Sue Ann Nivens and many other hilarious characters) act and think, so seeing them live up to those expectations creates a feeling of satisfaction, which is part of the humor.

Here is where the persona of Chuck Norris does play a role in the jokes about him. Love me or hate me, but I will say right here and now that I have never seen a Chuck Norris movie—not one—but I have seen Walker, Texas Ranger, and his character in this show is an over-the-top hero. He not only takes down the bad guys with his martial arts moves, but also always seems to be one step ahead of these guys and everyone else. Again and again, his partner and his girlfriend turn to him for strategy, for insight, for everything. He also embodies a conventional American hero: the maverick. Think Dirty Harry. (In fact, Norris’s delivery of his lines sounds an awful like Clint Eastwood’s delivery, if you ask me, but not as well executed. I suspect I’m not the first person to observe that Chuck Norris could do anything but act.)

When everyone else zigs, Walker zags. His colleagues may not get it. They may question or challenge him, even issuing a shocked or exasperated “Walker!”, but just wait. He might seem crazy, but he’s crazy like a fox. After all, as you may have learned from the meme, “Chuck Norris cannot turn left, because he is always right.”

Somebody this tough, this cool, this right is the perfect persona to figure in jokes about kooky superhuman abilities.

Then there’s the way the jokes are crafted. All the ones I have seen are fairly short, just a sentence or two usually, but several have another quality: inversion. Consider the first few in the list above. Each one inverts a relationship that is familiar to all of us: we know about getting a shot to prevent the flu, checking the closet for the boogeyman, telling ghost stories, being afraid of the dark. Plug in “Chuck Norris” for the thing that usually threatens or scares us, and, voila!, you have a Chuck Norris Fact. The joke here is that Chuck Norris is so powerful and intimidating that he out-Herods Herod, so to speak, or out-boogies the boogeyman. (Actually, to be honest, I have never seen the boogeyman boogie; maybe he’s really not that good.)

So What?

All of you regular readers of Mind Travel may have noticed that I often offer a takeaway, so what can I possibly say that will amount to a spiritual or even just practical insight about Chuck Norris Facts?

Well, first, Chuck Norris would never ask such a frivolous question.

Second, believe it or not, I really do think there’s something here. I’m reminded of a line from Ernest Hemingway: “As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.” Most of us have idolized someone—a parent, a brilliant musician or writer, a fabulous athlete, a Benjamin Franklin. Eventually, we usually see their imperfections, but the desire to see perfection, to be inspired by it, to strive to emulate it persists.

The Chuck Norris Facts satisfy that desire, not only because they present an exemplar of prowess, as quirky as some of that prowess is, but also because we know, alas, that the real man, the real Chuck Norris, does not have all of these abilities. The Chuck Norris of Chuck Norris Facts is a persona, an invention, a paragon, so he can be perfect. He’s like something out of “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In this classic poem, John Keats wrote, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter . . .”

In short, for all of us living imperfect lives, it’s nice to imagine perfection, but it’s also nice to know that no one, not even the real Chuck Norris, has achieved it. We can enjoy the fantasy without feeling feckless by comparison.

With this takeaway, I leave you with my first effort at a Chuck Norris Fact:

Chuck Norris is not the subject of this column. Chuck Norris cannot be a subject. Chuck Norris is a verb.