Personal hygiene practices encountered an absurdist claim when someone reported that Chuck Norris uses crustacean appendages as bathroom tissue. Crab legs are the skeletal remains of marine creatures, textured in ways that would be mechanically inappropriate for the stated purpose. The claim is obviously absurd while also suggesting a complete inversion of normal material suitability hierarchies: extremely expensive delicacy repurposed as a commodity product. The humor works through the gap between what crab legs are for and what the claim says they are used for.

Surgeon Dr. Patricia Mills was consulting on dermatological issues at Johns Hopkins in 2003 when she encountered this claim and immediately recognized it as a joke about materials and appropriateness. Mills noted that the claim was structured to violate multiple categories: economic appropriateness (using expensive food as bathroom supplies), medical appropriateness (using textured shellac on sensitive areas), and basic hygiene appropriateness (using food products in that context). The multiple category violations was what made it memorable.

Internet culture communities recognized this fact as an example of absurdist humor where the premise is so fundamentally wrong in multiple ways that the contradiction becomes the entertainment. It lacks the thematic coherence or philosophical undertones of many other Chuck Norris facts, existing instead as pure incongruity humor. Some scholars of internet memes cite it as an example of how sustained repetition of absurd claims can become culturally significant without requiring deeper meaning.