Thank you, OP, for this. I agree with every single word, and I salute you for representing my perspective on the entire Chuck Norris meme industry.
I know that funny is in the eye of the beholder, but I’ve never so much as cracked a half-smirk at a single Norris joke/meme. Every one seems to have been written by a 13-year-old who was challenged to come up with a Chuck Norris joke within the next 60 seconds.
I place them on the same tier as the “in Russia, you don’t X, Russia X’s you” nonsense.
I do have to admit that I’ve always found it a bit ironic that, on a site which dedicates itself to fighting ignorance, many of its members have long collectively pretended to (or in some cases, actually do) believe that its founder and main author is this mysterious, ageless, all-knowing, totally not imaginary ‘perfect master’
I mean, Cecil is so perfect, if he ever dies (not that he ever will) he’ll call God out on all His mistakes. “What the heck were you thinking with the platypus?!?”
Cecil himself never makes mistakes; the laws of nature sometimes fail and make it appear as if he did.
Stephen Hawking used to have Cecil’s number on speed dial for whenever he got stuck on a physics problem.
Exactly so. Same way as “Yo mama…”, and “knock knock” … and “it was so hot …” It was a joke formula and trying to be funny within the formula was the challenge. Sometimes met successfully. Definitely not always!
I never found the jokes funny, but also see it as harmless fun, and since they are bigging him up, not disrespectful to his name or family.
And in terms of memes having sell-by dates, there’s a lot that have persisted on similar timescales as the chuck norris thing and are far more annoying. I’m not going to list them though, as it will inevitably hijack to pitting other stuff.
I liked them better when they were Vin Diesel jokes. And I think there were a couple of other celebrities the same jokes rested on for a while, before settling on Norris. For some reason, though, when they got to him, they stuck.
I will say, though, that when Chuck Norris does pushups, he really is pushing the Earth down. Newton’s 3rd Law FTW!
I like to picture future archeologists, like a thousand years from now, unearthing a large repository of Chuck Norris jokes but not understanding that they’re jokes.
Ehhh, I never found them funny. But I also avoid pretty much any conversation involving Chuck Norris as a subject, because I can’t think of any reason I’d want to talk about him.
I watched it, very diligently - but ironically - as a teenage/early 20s stoner. It was fun and ridiculous. I was, to a certain extent doing it for some sort of shock value because it was so bad and predictable. But I could tell my friends what Ol’ Chuck was up to…
The one that I don’t think is funny at all and never was is the idea that John Cena is invisible. It is such a dumb joke and yet every time John Cena pops up anywhere, someone has to make the same stupid comment about not being able to see him. It isn’t funny, never was and never will be.
I’ve seen the same kind of jokes used about both real people and fictional characters.
The earliest I know of would be about Theodore Roosevelt: “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.” - 1919
For fictional characters I’ve seen whole collections of them in the form of “(Insert Character) Facts”.
Thankfully I’ve only seen it like 10 times. The first time it was utterly perplexing and not even funny when it was explained to me. The second and third times it was very mildly rewarding. Not even funny per se, just satisfying that I got the reference. After that it became irritating.
They’ll have it easy compared to the ones who discover some other bits of Internet humor. Like my social media feed after the Will Smith slap was all obscure allusions to either Fresh Prince of Bel Air and/or the Macbeth curse. Good look understanding those in a couple of millennia
[deep breaths] All right…I’ve finally calmed down enough to come back here, and I have to say that the responses were…more or less what I expected.
AlsoNamedBort - A massive irritation doesn’t have to be ubiquitous, or even commonplace, to be massively irritating, because the fact that it exists at all is bad enough. It’s like a single random eardrum-shredding firework going off in the middle of a quiet evening, or riding down a peaceful bike path and suddenly slamming into a pothole. And the exact same thing happening every few months afterward…indefinitely. I’m guessing you wouldn’t casually shrug that sort of thing off; heck, you might think you’re cursed. That’s how it is with me and this Chuck Norris idiocy; I still haven’t seen the end. “All your base are belong to us” ended “Hi, Opal!” ended. “Snake! Snake! SNAAAAAKE!” ended. Not Chuck Norris Facts. Every time I thought it was gone, some asswipe resurrected it. Maybe death is the final straw, but I can’t be sure of it. There was a time I thought measles was whipped too.
Joey_P - Ah, yes, I remember that one. I’m actually not too worried because he’s just a goofy comedian and not some bizarre God figure with a whole goddamned book praising his omnipotence. I’m also fairly certain that by the time he dies, nearly all of social media won’t remember what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics even was, much less what made it so backward or adversarial.
Mean_Mr. Mustard - You’re welcome! I’m actually trying to avoid huge tirades now…bad for the blood pressure and all…but when those frigging jokes cropped up again on this board, I couldn’t stay quiet.
solost - You know what, this wouldn’t even have bugged me that much if these people would’ve just come clean about it afterward. “There’s so much stupidity in my life. I knew the idea of an omniscient invisible columnist was out there, but I was so desperate to the idea of supreme intelligence…I just wanted to believe.” I’m human! I’ve been driven to ridiculous beliefs in moments of weakness! I can relate to that! There’s just so long you can keep kayfabe going before it becomes just pathetic, you know?
DWMarch - Y’know, all this time I thought that meant “I’m going to batter you unconscious”. I never thought him the weird non sequitur type.
(Slightly) more seriously, it’s already been a few years since the last time we had a thread about the (mostly welcome) death of the tired SDMB in-group clichés.
That shit does stay dead once enough time has passed. Norris gonna stay dead too.
He will. The specific version of the “hyperbole joke” that includes him dies as his death is out of news cycle.
But the joke form? Filling in some other X for Norris, and some other attribute Y for “tough” or whatever it was? Pretty sure those have been around since antiquity and will be around for a long long time to come.
How hot was it? Yo mama is so … The villagers of Chelm … Paul Bunyon was so strong that …Og is so dumb that …
)
I’m actually trying to avoid huge tirades now…bad for the blood pressure and all…but when those frigging jokes cropped up again on this board, I couldn’t stay quiet.