Chuck Norris was a karate legend, then an action star, and then ... memes. So many memes. This is the hilarious story of how Chuck Norris Facts melted the internet in 2005 and how its creator is now using AI to shake up the world in even bigger ways.
night in 2005, Ian Spector was sitting at his computer, unable to get ahold of any of his real-life friends. So, the high school senior eventually got antsy and decided to connect with his virtual friends instead.
"It was a group of people who probably wouldn't ever want to hang out in person in real life," Spector says."But they did want to hang out there." Spector was a brilliant kid, so savvy with computers that he taught an internet class for senior citizens when he was in third grade. As he got older, Spector became known as the kid who could rip R-rated comedy CDs for you. He used his web savviness to fit in, and slipping the cool kids a bootleg Chris Rock or Wanda Sykes album was the ultimate icebreaker.
He shrugged his shoulders and kept pulling from SomethingAwful while also adding some of his own. His generator continued to rack up views for a month or two. Either way, Spector had a clear winner to try for future"facts," and he couldn't help but giggle as he began to type in the name"Chuck Norris" over and over again. The internet was a few minutes away from getting a roundhouse kick that changed it forever.Cannon Pictures/Getty Images, Chuck Norris was on the second tier of a wave of martial arts and fighting movies that would bank billions at the box office.
But by the mid-1990s, the repetition of his movies -- all the fighting movies, actually -- seemed to have worn out movie crowds. Norris took a job on"Walker, Texas Ranger," a hokey but popular TV series about Norris having a badge as he spinning-back fisted criminals in the face. Walker ran for eight successful years. But as he hit his early 60s in the 2000s, ass kicking roles became a bit of a stretch -- even for Chuck Norris, a guy whose vehicles supposedly run on fear.
Lankshear goes so far as to say maybe every elementary school class lesson should start with a meme. He believes that telling 25 third-graders in 2023 to crack open a textbook or look at a smartboard in the front of the class is setting up kids for failure. That's not how they've learned for the first chapter of their lives. They grow up on screens, with emojis and memes and GIFs and photos with short captions.
Spector had stumbled into a seismic early version of the meme. The site continued to take off, and he came home from Brown after his first semester still a little baffled by his own creation. He remembers sitting in his parents' living room one night during the break, watching"Lost" and wondering what was in the hatch, when the phone rang."I'm watching something," Spector said."I'll call them back.
A few weeks later, Spector found himself in an elevator in Connecticut, heading up to a casino suite. In photos from that day, he looks like the absolute last person on earth who would be a meme mogul of jokes about the hyper-masculine heroics of Chuck Norris. He was just a skinny kid, barely out of high school. Even now, he says he's not sure if he is a nerd or a geek."Probably both," he finally suggests.
They hung out for about an hour. Spector felt jittery at first, but Gena gently drove most of the conversation. She asked about him and how he came up with the idea for the site, and as Spector talked, he noticed how she and Chuck had begun to spoon on the small couch together."They were pretty lovey-dovey over there," Spector says.
As their time together wound down, Spector felt honored by how much the Norrises were asking him about his life -- they seemed genuinely interested in him. He thinks it might have been as simple as that. Or perhaps they were just as befuddled that an 18-year-old college freshman was sitting here, talking about a concept that had commandeered the internet and boosted Norris' stardom overnight more than any team of managers and publicists could have come up with.
A little while later, Spector and his dad stood to leave. They'd been invited to stay for the MMA event, and part of Spector wishes he'd said yes. But truthfully, he's not an MMA guy. He's not even really a Chuck Norris guy -- he doesn't agree with some of Norris' conservative politics, and he has regrets about some of the more crude jokes he's published over the years.
So he started compiling his favorite Norris facts, and he wrote a bunch of new ones himself, too. Spector has a beautiful mind. He's so smart it is intimidating, citing studies and experiments in casual conversation that no single person should ever know off the top of their head.
He began to mention on the site that he'd gotten a book deal, and a few small media outlets referenced that it was coming. The book published, and within a week or so, a cease-and-desist letter arrived. Believe it or not, Mulligan says Penguin loved it. Norris' attorneys were saying that his likeness was being leveraged to make money.
As he flips through a few of his books now, some of the Facts make him wince a bit. He really wishes he had a do-over when it came to all the sexual prowess jokes, and he also worries he played some small role in the way a certain brand of toxic masculinity has come roaring back. It's not hard to imagine someone starting a successful Andrew Tate Facts website.
Norris had become some version of a rock star again, too. He continued to navigate a fine line between reveling in his revived relevance and his discomfort at not being the originator of it. When asked for comment for this story, a PR rep for Norris said he"politely passed," which is probably how he deals with kidney stones, too.
Spector loves stuff like that: utilitarian tech for humans. What's the best way to design a ballot that isn't confusing to voters? What is the exact size and spacing for where a cupholder in a car goes? Spector can talk about these topics for hours. His life has landed him in the middle of a fascinating intersection. On one hand, he developed an entire humor genre that swept the internet. On the other, he spends his work weeks at the cutting edge of technology. Those two things -- the humor creator and the robot maker -- sure seem at odds with each other. We've all cringed watching Elon Musk try to be funny, and we don't want to see Bill Burr develop a new app for monitoring heart rates. Spector is trying to straddle both realms.
With Chuck Norris Facts, the internet never really turned on them. Just a rise and then a slow fade into internet history. Almost like a great athlete who walks away after an All-Star season. Toward the end of telling the story of Chuck Norris Facts in Boston recently, Spector is given a hypothetical.
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