Chuck Norris died this week. The legendary actor, martial artist, and sometime spokesman for crappy fitness products I talked my parents into buying so I could get buff as a teenager was 86, but the version of Chuck Norris the internet knows and loves passed on quite a while ago, if he ever existed at all.
If you were around the web in the 2000s, you know what I'm talking about. After Norris's prime years as an action star were in the rearview, his legend continued to grow, until the version of Chuck Norris we all knew and memed was something closer to a cartoon character than a person. Thousands of memes about Norris's impossible toughness and martial prowess flooded pop culture, making him into something like a social media folk hero even as his real-life escapades devolved into stumping for conservative politicians and doing commercials. That means that the best tributes to the late action icon have already happened, and the best of the best was born more than two decades ago, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
I'm obsessed with Conan's Late Night show. I used to stay up late on Friday nights to catch episodes, marveling at the idea that this strange, irreverent performer was allowed to get away with everything he and his merry band of comedy chaos agents carried out on the show. You really never knew what you'd get from a Late Night episode, which is why, one night in 2004, it seemed both inevitable and impossible that Conan was introducing the Walker Lever.
The bit went like this: Because GE and NBC merged to form NBC Universal in the early 2000s, Conan and his crew had fresh access to episodes of Norris's legendary series Walker, Texas Ranger. So, to celebrate this freedom, Conan had a lever installed at his desk that, when pulled, would play a random clip from a Walker episode, usually involving either absurd violence, out-of-context insane dialogue, or both. Now, believe me when I tell you that I think Late Night with Conan O'Brien is one of the most important pieces of comedy ever produced in the 1990s and 2000s. It's an essential, and it paved the way for so many other comedy weirdos to carry Conan's style, which was itself built on David Letterman's style, forward into new eras. Every part of it is important to me, but if you want a bit that'll just drop full-on knee-slapping belly laughs every single time, it doesn't get better than the Walker Lever. Watch the video above, thank me later.
So, why bring this up now? Well, first of all, you'll find I'm far from the only one praising the Walker Lever after Norris's death, but more importantly: The version of Chuck Norris we as comedy and action fans love is a version that perhaps never quite existed. The ultimate tough guy, the indestructible bundle of pure American grit? That guy was an invention both of Norris's films and pop culture at large, and Conan's Walker Lever is the best celebration of that guy's continued impact. It's the natural and absurd conclusion to Norris's mythologization, and for me at least, the way I want to remember him.
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