Most people know Chuck Norris, who died on Friday at age 86, as the inspiration for Chuck Norris Facts — the handle for a thousand jokes about his supposed fearsomeness and indestructability. But jokes aside, the karate champion turned actor was a moral scold with bizarro reactionary beliefs and zero sense of humor. After his television show “Walker: Texas Ranger” puttered out along with the 1990s, by all rights he should have spent his remaining days autographing photos for $30 a pop in poorly lit exurban Radisson hotel ballrooms. But by some weird twist of fate, the internet chose to weaponize his stock one-note persona and has-been status. By 2006, Chuck Norris was the internet’s favorite and most untouchable ironic tough guy, feared by everything on earth and the sun at the center of the solar system. (“Chuck Norris had a staring contest with the Sun and won.”) For a man who wanted to be remembered for his punches, becoming a punchline must have been a tough pill to swallow. But Chuck Norris doesn’t swallow pills. He defeats them. This includes the grand irony that Norris benefited so grandly from irony. Absurd humor and twitchy, mutant nostalgia were forces he never understood, and throughout his five-decade career in movies and television, he was never funny on purpose. When a young David Letterman lobbed jokes at Norris, he could only woodenly redirect the conversation to serious topics , like his oft-made claim to be half Cherokee. Chuck Norris Facts were driven by easily replicable absurdity, but also by cruelty. They began with people laughing at Norris, not with him. Even when “ Walker: Texas Ranger ” was on the air, the show’s moralizing tone, awkward pacing and stammering storytelling seemed like a relic from another television era with vastly different expectations of entertainment, one where a child actor could deliver straight-faces lines like, “Walker told me I have AIDS.” It was TV for people who couldn’t handle “The Sopranos.” But over time, all of America decided it could handle “The Sopranos.” Both Norris and “Walker: Texas Ranger” seemed ham-fisted, dull and preachy. Chuck Norris’ stiff onscreen television presence, together with low budget ’80s schlock like the Rambo-ripoff “Missing in Action” series, made him a ripe target for parody — something that I know from personal experience that Norris hated. In the year 2000, shortly before Chuck Norris Facts took the internet by storm, Norris’s legal team threatened my college zine with a lawsuit over a satirical article written in 1995 by my preceding editor (and current Truthdig senior editor, Alexander Zaitchik). Using photos from Norris’ 1970s film roles, the article imagined the shenanigans that might have occurred had Norris attended our college, gotten wild and done kung fu stuff. Norris’ lawyers carbon copied the letter to the school’s administration, made a point of relaying Norris’ personal displeasure at being depicted as a brawling, kick-happy undergraduate — a role he never accepted — and demanded we take down and “retract” the article. Under pressure from the deans, the staff pulled the web version and replaced it with a nonsatirical article about objectionable things Norris had done in real life. Absurd humor and twitchy, mutant nostalgia were forces he never understood. By the mid-2000s, parodying Norris was mainstream. Hundreds of internet users took advantage of templates to easily create memes; and Norris and his lawyers realized they couldn’t threaten the entire internet with a lawsuit. The Norris parody phenomenon broke containment in 2004, when Conan O’Brien turned out-of-context melodramatic clips from “Walker: Texas Ranger” into a running gag . That year, Norris also appeared in the 2004 comedy “Dodgeball” alongside fellow irony-soaked celebrities David Hasselhoff and William Shatner. In 2006, Andy Sandberg and his Lonely Island cohorts created a “Saturday Night Live”digital short celebrating the adventures of young Chuck Norris . What did Chuck Norris do with his newfound late-life fame? Naturally, he launched an opinion column on the conservative Christian website WorldNetDaily. In his inaugural column, he addressed the jokes, saying “some are funny. Some are pretty far out” before segueing into an argument against evolution. He kept writing WND columns until February 2025, with headlines including “ Child trafficking disguised as adoption ,” “ How Abraham Lincoln Won the Superbowl ,” a “ Power Greater Than my Punch ” and “ Jihadism is alive and well 23 years after 9/11: Here’s why .” The same year Norris launched his WND column, he joined the board of directors of the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools , a right-wing evangelical Christian group fighting the “great social regression” that broke out after the Bible was removed from America schools and told Chuck Norris jokes on the campaign trail with then-presidential candidate and current Israel ambassador Mike Huckabee. By 2012, Chuck Norris jokes had cratered in popularity, save perhaps the screenwriters of “The Expendables 2,” but Norris’s love for Republican politicians was just picking up. He not only endorsed Newt Gingrich but released a video where he held hands with his wife and sternly warned America that reelecting Barack Obama would usher in a “1,000 years of darkness.” He got on the MAGA train early and often–something Trump acknowledged by calling Norris a “tough cookie” upon his death. Although he didn’t make it to D.C. on Jan. 6, a Chuck Norris doppelganger did . Personally, I choose to remember Norris, not for the jokes, nor for “Walker: Texas Ranger,” nor for his columns, but for his turn playing a goon squaring off against Bruce Lee in “The Way of the Dragon .” Against the backdrop of a Roman coliseum, Norris is introduced wearing a generic white Karate gi, like an eight-year-old learning the importance of “respect” in his first session at some strip mall dojo. Norris removes his cloth belt, cracks his knuckles, and attempts a look of steely eyed determination, a la his future “Delta Force” co-star Lee Marvin, but doesn’t quite pull it off. Shirtless, he shakes his immaculately feathered bob and starts doing karate stretches, revealing a remarkably hirsute belly and two eye-brow-like tufts of back hair. Early in the fight, Bruce Lee rips out a patch of Norris’s chest hair before gently blowing it from his hand like a child blowing the soft cotton-like patches of a puffy dandelion. The rest of the fight is a serious, bloody affair, but the chest hair is the only thing anybody remembers.
The post RIP Chuck Norris, Humorless Karate Conservative appeared first on Truthdig .