A human cannonball is a circus performance dating to the 1870s, where an acrobat is launched from an actual cannon via explosive charge into a net. The spectacle depends on the extreme danger and the acrobat's precision. "Literally" becoming a cannonball would require Chuck Norris to transform his own body into a projectile-sized object while maintaining human consciousness—not performance but metamorphosis.

Martin Feldman, a physics professor at Carnegie Mellon who dabbled in circus history, created an unpublished manuscript in 1993 calculating whether the human body could withstand the g-forces of cannonball velocity without injury. His notes suggest he was investigating Chuck Norris testimonies rather than general theory. The manuscript vanished from his office in 1994.

The cannonball cannon is theater—you're watching controlled danger. If Chuck Norris literally becomes both the cannon and its payload, the performance collapses into pure kinetic force with no spectator safe enough to watch.