To this day, Spector isn't sure if one person voted dozens of times, or dozens of people voted for the same guy.Įither 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. but there was a surprise write-in candidate who had 50-plus votes. None of his 10 options got to double digits. When Spector sifted through the results, his eyebrows went up a bit. At the last minute, Spector threw in a write-in spot, too. He put up about 10 options, including Cheney and Jackson, and he even included Paris Hilton just because it was peak Paris at the time. Jackson has punched people so hard that their blood bleeds" or "Dick Cheney uses pepper spray to season his meat." They all hovered around the basic concept of American uber-machismo in a way that both mocked and stoked it. He thought it would be pretty seamless to have versions of his site that spit out "Samuel L. The beauty of most of the jokes was that they weren't specific to Diesel. Just when interest seemed to have died down a bit, he posted a poll asking who would be a good person to sub in for Vin Diesel. His generator continued to rack up views for a month or two. He shrugged his shoulders and kept pulling from SomethingAwful while also adding some of his own. but couldn't quite get his head around why it provoked such a large audience response. His brain started cooking about building something around this strange phenomenon. In the morning, he woke up and was surprised that his dinky strewn-together site had exploded with 10,000 visits overnight. He posted a link on SomethingAwful and went to bed. His site, 4Q.cc, was pretty rudimentary: A fact would pop up, then users would click a tab to randomly generate another one. Late into the evening, Spector began copying and pasting his favorites, somewhere around 50, into a primitive generator tool on his website. That night, he laughed at the endless stream of jokes people were posting. 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. As he got older, Spector became known as the kid who could rip R-rated comedy CDs for you. Spector was a brilliant kid, so savvy with computers that he taught an internet class for senior citizens when he was in third grade. There was something inherently hilarious about following the movie's example of juxtaposing Diesel's manliness with over-the-top "facts." And on computers around the world, snarky teenaged rabble-rousers loved piling on Diesel. His new movie, "The Pacifier," featured him attempting to turn his muscular masculinity on its head by playing a monotoned Navy Seal who had to go undercover as a babysitter to protect a family.Ĭritics hated the movie but it grossed $200 million worldwide. The idea was a half-homage, half-goof on Diesel, who was having an internet moment at the time. They were absurdist jokes, like "Vin Diesel counted to infinity - twice" and "Superman wears Vin Diesel pajamas to bed." Some had funny pictures of Diesel that amplified the joke. He was even more intrigued when he began scrolling through and realized that they weren't actual facts about Diesel. It was titled "Facts about Vin Diesel," and he was intrigued that there were eight pages of comments. "But they did want to hang out there."Īs Spector scrolled through the constant stream of new forums and new comments on old forums, he was struck by one particular thread. "It was a group of people who probably wouldn't ever want to hang out in person in real life," Spector says. Believe it or not, the site is still active. They were memes, even if people didn't commonly use that word at the time. That night, he logged onto, a kind of pre-Reddit Reddit full of high school and college-aged hell-raisers who'd grown up stealing music on Napster, listening to the Jerky Boys make prank phone calls and matching funny photos with one-liners to goof around. Ian Spector was about to become one of the internet's first meme kingmakers. What happened next is the internet equivalent of Marie Curie discovering radium, or Thomas Edison inventing the telegraph. So, the high school senior eventually got antsy and decided to connect with his virtual friends instead. ON A BORING FRIDAY night in 2005, Ian Spector was sitting at his computer, unable to get ahold of any of his real-life friends. How Chuck Norris Facts gave birth to the modern meme You have reached a degraded version of because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.įor a complete experience, please upgrade or use a supported browser
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