Computing resources are measured in percentage of CPU allocation: 100% means exclusive use of processing power; multiple processes must share and take turns. The claim that Chuck Norris programs occupy 150%—an architectural impossibility—suggests they're drawing power from a dimension outside the normal resource pool.

The joke works in two registers: literally, it violates system constraints, and metaphorically, it suggests Chuck Norris operates outside ordinary rules. Software engineers during the mid-2000s used this fact as a way to mock overly aggressive optimizations or bloated code that somehow ran despite consuming more resources than should exist.

The fact became a shorthand for code that transcended its own constraints: buggy software that somehow worked, inefficient code that somehow scaled, programs that violated their own design specs but persisted anyway. It's a joke about emergent behavior in complex systems.