Sometime around 2005, the internet decided that Chuck Norris was indestructible. It started on comedy forums and a website of user-submitted “facts” in the style of: Chuck Norris does not do push-ups, he pushes the Earth down. Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice. The joke spread to message boards, e-mail chains and dorm rooms, and became one of the first truly global internet memes.
Why Norris?
The facts first attached to other tough guys, including Vin Diesel, but they stuck to Norris. He was a martial arts champion turned action star, best known by then for the long-running television series Walker, Texas Ranger, and his on-screen persona was earnest enough to be fun to exaggerate. The jokes were affectionate. They made him funnier, not smaller.
Playing along
Norris handled it with good humor. He talked about the facts on television, read a few aloud, and said he found many of them funny, though he did not like ones that he felt mocked his faith. Advertisers noticed. He went on to appear in commercials that leaned on the legend, and the meme arguably gave his career a second life with a generation that had never watched his films.
Then the lawyers arrived
Being a joke on the internet is one thing. Someone else selling it is another. In late 2007 Norris sued the publisher Penguin and author Ian Spector over The Truth About Chuck Norris, a book collecting the facts, arguing it used his name and identity to make money without permission. The suit drew wide coverage because it seemed to clash with the cheerful image, and it was later dropped.
The episode was an early example of a question celebrities still face: a fan joke is free publicity, but when it turns into merchandise, books or ads, whose name is being sold? Plenty of small fan sites selling T-shirts heard from lawyers around the same time.
The legacy
The Chuck Norris facts set a template for internet humor that is still with us: a simple format anyone can add to, a real person cast as a myth, and an audience that keeps topping itself. Most memes fade in months. This one is still being repeated two decades later, which may be the most Chuck Norris fact of all.
Sources: Chuck Norris facts, Wikipedia; Chuck Norris, Wikipedia.
