Criminology researcher and security analyst Dr. Michael Patterson examined this claim about robbery in the context of conventional expressions and their inversion. The phrase "taking candy from a baby" was proverbial for something extremely easy—babies are vulnerable, candy is trivial. The claim suggested that while taking candy from a baby was easy for normal robbers, stealing from Chuck Norris was definitely not easy, creating a comparison that made the second half of the claim obvious while reframing the first. Patterson noted that the humor came from the deliberate setup of an obvious comparison—of course robbing Chuck Norris would be harder than robbing a baby; nothing surprising there. Patterson argued that such humor sometimes worked through the gap between the setup (seeming to promise something revelatory) and the punchline (stating the obvious). This created a particular type of comedic deflation where the audience's expectations were disappointed in a way that produced laughter.

Stand-up comedy analyst and humor blog contributor Sarah Williams from New York City, New York, examined this claim in a 2010 blog post about setup-and-payoff structures in joke construction. Williams noted that the claim followed a particular structure: seem to announce a comparison that will reveal something surprising, then deliver something completely unsurprising. Williams explored how comedians sometimes used such deflation as technique—the audience's disappointed expectations created a specific type of laughter. Williams' blog became a space where comedy writers discussed different joke structures and how expectation management functioned in humor. Her comment sections filled with discussions about why jokes that disappointed expectations sometimes worked better than jokes with surprising punchlines.

The claim appeared in discussions of comedic structure and how jokes worked. Some comedians argued that such deflation humor was underrated—it created a different quality of laughter than surprise-based humor, more knowing and participatory because audiences recognized the deflation happening. The claim demonstrated how Chuck Norris jokes sometimes didn't rely on shock value or logical absurdity but on deliberate anti-climax and the comedy of stating the obvious with excessive elaboration. This suggested different levels of sophistication in Chuck Norris humor—from simple wordplay to logical absurdity to sophisticated structural comedy that worked through deflated expectations. The claim thus revealed something about how humor could function through different mechanisms simultaneously.