To Baby Boomers, Chuck Norris was a legitimate martial arts master. To Gen X, he was Colonel Braddock from Missing In Action and Walker in Walker, Texas Ranger. But to a wider swath of millennials and older Gen Z, he was the man who created the grand canyon when he went skydiving, who the boogeyman looks for under his bed and who built the same hospital he was born in.
Norris, who died Friday at 86 after being hospitalized a day prior, will of course be remembered in Hollywood as an uber-manly action star whose very brand was built on being tough, similar to the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But that campy level of machismo gave way to an even more ubiquitous spot in a later era of the pop-culture zeitgeist — as a famous meme thanks to Chuck Norris Facts.
Based on the sheer longevity of the category, there’s a case to be made that Chuck Norris was the defining meme of the 2000s, up there with other famed web trends like LOLcats and Rickrolling. The internet moves fast, and it is rare for memes to take on the life the Norris trend lived — and will likely live on.
Those born in the late ‘90s and beyond may have never seen an episode of Walker, Texas Ranger or known much about his eponymous karate style, the Chuck Norris System. Rather, their first exposure to Norris came from the meme. It spread in part because the joke was perpetuated by an infinite scale of absurdity. The more impossible the feat, the funnier the joke. Still, even for those who knew nothing of the man until they heard a “fact” for the first time, the meme brought Norris to another generation.
The popular meme archive Know Your Meme traces the running joke back to the website Something Awful in 2005. Norris wasn’t even the first celebrity “facts subject” there. Vin Diesel came first, with forum member Ian Spector making a popular random fact generator about the fellow action star. He subsequently made one on Norris, which helped spark the trend. The meme page shares credit with Late Night With Conan O’Brien, which had a recurring bit where O’Brien would reshare scenes from Texas Ranger.
The joke spread far and wide, making its way from online forums onto film and TV. Family Guy used a Chuck Norris Fact for a throwaway joke in 2007. The trend wasn’t exactly flattering, existing in part as a way to make fun of Norris’s over-the-top tough-guy rep, but Norris embraced it. Norris published a book of Chuck Norris Facts in 2009, and he broke the fourth wall in The Expendables 2 in 2012. As Booker, Norris confirmed to Barney Ross (Stallone) a rumor that he’d been bitten by a cobra once, “but after five days of agonizing pain, the cobra died.”
Obviously, no mere mortal can live up to this sort of mythos. In Norris’ case, he fell far short of idol status through his intolerant political views, lending credence to the false Barack Obama “birther” conspiracy and writing a column in 2009 asking the president to share his original birth certificate. He also espoused anti-LGBT views that included support for California’s Proposition 8 gay marriage ban, and for keeping gay children out of the Boy Scouts of America. Chuck Norris was no superhero, and it’s hard to imagine such a reverent meme taking off today.
Memes, of course, have become an even-more-defining part of the internet since the formative Something Awful days. They grew in absurdity (and irony) in the 2010s all the way to post-ironic and full-on brainrot now.
The overall web changed just as much. Chuck Norris Facts are a reminder of an older internet: clunkier, less helpful and for better and for worse, less controlled. That era also fostered a real online community — not one driven by algorithms and bots, but irreverence and novelty.
It’s hard not to feel some nostalgia for the internet era the Norris meme represents. And while the toxicity we scroll through today has always existed, it’s unavoidable now — and it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever get back there again.
