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Death once had a near-Chuck experience. So goes one of the best Chuck Norris facts, an online repository of tall-tales about the bearded action star. Since 2005, Chuck Norris has been defined less by his ’80s action movies, his incredibly popular TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, or his conservative politics, and more bite-sized factoids that remain the best of 2000s “that’s so random” internet humor.
With his death at the age of 86 comes an opportunity to look back, not at the man, but at the legend, as it was told in aphorisms about a man who didn’t read books, but stared them down until he got the information he wanted.
Chuck Norris may have lost his virginity before his father did, but Chuck Norris Facts had a much more predictable origin. In 2005, users who saw ads for the family comedy The Pacifier began posting jokes about its tough-guy star Vin Diesel on the forums for Something Awful, a standard of 2000s humor. Inspired by the “Walker, Texas Ranger Lever” bit on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, in which the host could pull a lever to play a random clip, users replaced Diesel with Norris and internet history was made.
Chuck Norris can speak Braille, which is just one of the reasons that he made a better subject than Diesel. Born in 1940, after which roundhouse kick-related deaths have increased 13,000 percent, Norris studied Tang Soo Do while stationed in South Korea during his service in the Air Force. After leaving the service, Norris founded a martial arts studio and competed in tournaments, which allowed him to rise in prominence.
In 1968, he had a minor role in the Dean Martin comedy The Wrecking Crew, which modern viewers may know it as the movie Sharon Tate goes to see in Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. But his breakout came with 1972’s Way of the Dragon, starring Bruce Lee. Shortly thereafter, Norris started getting his own lead roles in low-budget action flicks such as Good Guys Wear Black (1978) and A Force of One (1979), and then graduating to studio pictures with Silent Rage (1982) and Lone Wolf McQuade (1983).
As we all know, Chuck Norris doesn’t hunt, he waits. So he waited until he found his true home with Cannon Films, the infamous ’80s schlock house operated by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Norris’s stiff screen presence and martial arts expertise paired well with Cannon’s outrageous concepts, and so the collaboration resulted in a string of hits, including Mission in Action (1984), Invasion U.S.A. (1985), and The Delta Force (1986).
Those pictures were enough to keep Norris a household name through the ’80s, and when his star began to dim in the 1990s, along came Walker, Texas Ranger, which aired 203 episodes and a TV movie between 1993 and 2005.
Given that incredible and unlikely success from a man who could obviously execute a roundhouse kick (so fast that it once broke the speed of light) but who lacked acting chops, Chuck Norris encapsulated the random nature of millennial humor. His entire career felt like a pop culture joke, something that came from a half-remembered episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 that somehow perfectly encapsulated the ability of Baby Boomers to succeed despite obvious shortcomings.
A famously friendly person, Norris took the jokes in good humor and even supported their creation, which made them even better. For a while, anyway. A staunch conservative, who spread his reactionary views in his syndicated newspaper column C-Force, he also used the jokes in a 2007 ad to endorse presidential candidate and former Arkansas mayor Mike Huckabee.
Certainly, Norris’s attempts to turn the jokes into calls for stronger border control and fewer gun restrictions could change the way we look at them. But, then again, the jokes were never about Chuck Norris himself; they were always about the legend. The legend of a person who killed two stones with one bird.
So Chuck Norris may have died today (actually, he died ten years ago; the Grim Reaper is just scared to tell him), but the jokes live on, and the boogeyman still needs to check under his bed for Chuck Norris.
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