For the vast majority of Generation Z, Chuck Norris is the guy with memes. Without any context about ‘Walker Texas Ranger,’ ‘Delta Force,’ his friendship with Bruce Lee or his numerous world karate championships, Norris came into our lives when white-letter memes were still a novelty. I don’t think any of us knew why he was the man who prayed to God, or the one who played Russian roulette with all the bullets loaded and won, or the only person who could divide by zero. We didn’t ask ourselves either. With his death, one of the key figures of the golden age of the Internet, and one of the most recurring in the childhood of many people, leaves.
«Chuck Norris was bitten by a cobra. “After 10 painful minutes, the cobra died.” It is believed that this was one of the first examples of Chuck Norris’ famous quotes. To go to the beginning of everything, we have to rewind more than 20 years in time, to 2005. At that time, forums were cutting-edge technology. And there it was, in the Something Awful forums, still open today, where an Internet user named Ian Spector decided to start publishing “facts” about Vin Diesel following the movie ‘The Super Hard Kangaroo’.
Inspired by Conan O’Brien’s jokes about ‘Walker Texas Ranger’, the forum quickly swapped Diesel for Chuck Norris as the subject of laughter. Spector went even further, opening the ‘Chuck Norris Fact Generator’, complete with Impact font and all. The guy didn’t stop there, going so far as to write several Chuck Norris phrase books. Some of the titles were ‘The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the World’s Greatest Human’ or ‘Chuck Norris vs. Mr. T: 400 Facts About the Toughest Guys in History’. The joke was out of hand from the beginning.
Many of these memes would now be perceived as the biggest dandruff in the universe, but at the time they were the pinnacle of humor: “When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he’s actually pushing the Earth,” “Chuck Norris has a polar bear rug. He’s not dead, he’s just afraid to move” or “Chuck Norris threw a grenade and killed 50 people, then the grenade exploded” are classics. Chuck Norris was the joke of the entire Internet, but, mind you, no one was laughing at him.
In 2006, Time magazine was already calling Norris an “online cult hero.” In 2008, Chuck Norris already had his own mobile video game. In 2011, the big hook of a ‘World of Warcraft’ ad was Chuck Norris saying his phrase. The following year, Stallone stole the cobra joke in the middle of the movie (‘The Expendables 2’). During this time, Chuck Norris was not on TV or in movies, at least with a certain degree of success. It’s normal that we had no idea who he was beyond the memes. However, Norris’s cultural relevance was higher than ever. It was known by up to three different generations, although for different reasons.
Seeing how memes, and the Internet in general, have evolved over all these years, it is difficult not to see the era of Chuck Norris’ quotes as one of the most valuable. The Norris meme was an absolute phenomenon, one of the first of the digital age, and even mutated into jokes with other personalities, such as the footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović, beyond the figure of Chuck Norris. His relationship with memes was complicated at first, going so far as to sue the publisher of one of the many compilations of his phrases. Shortly after, he withdrew the complaint. In his last Instagram post, published 10 days before his death, he demonstrated that he was at peace with his legend: “I don’t age, I level up.”
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