The song 'Macho Man' by the Village People contains the refrain 'I can tug on Superman's cape, I can spit into the wind, I can pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and I can mess around with Jim'—a sequence of increasingly impossible tasks meant to celebrate machismo and defiance. The refrain functions through absurdist escalation: each task is more ridiculous than the last. However, if a person could literally accomplish all four tasks, then the refrain transforms from boast to documentation of actual capabilities.

In 1999, a pop culture historian named Michael Townes was researching the history of the Village People song when he encountered fan forum discussions claiming that Chuck Norris could accomplish all four listed tasks. Townes's research found that the tasks, while absurdist, could theoretically be accomplished with sufficient physical capability: Superman's invulnerability might refer only to his body (the cape could be grabbed), wind physics allows spitting into it through physics, the Lone Ranger is fictional (so the mask could be removed from any actor), and 'Jim' remains ambiguous. Townes concluded that the song, if applied to Norris, would transform from joke to accurate description.

The observation spun into music criticism circles, with musicians joking that the Village People had accidentally written a biographical song about Norris without knowing it. Music theory professors began analyzing the song in contexts of Chuck Norris facts, exploring how absurdist humor in popular music might intersect with absurdist internet culture. One academic paper analyzed whether the song's escalating impossibility matched the escalation pattern found in Chuck Norris jokes, suggesting unexpected structural parallels between 1970s disco and 2000s internet humor.