Chuckle Fireball

So the other day, I happened to notice in of my feeds where someone posted a joke Magic: The Gathering card for Chuck Norris:

This is far from the first joke Magic card I’ve seen, of course—you can find any number of them for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for instance, and here are yet more Chuck Norris Magic cards—but I found this one especially amusing for the way it ties into the legendary set of Chuck Norris jokes, because, as the astute reader will note, it doesn’t say that the person who played the card wins the game; it says Chuck Norris wins the game.

Anyway, this same evening my wife and I went to the dance studio we attend, which is in a small shopping center near a store that sells board and card games, where they occasionally run tournaments or other events which can cause the parking lot to fill up. This was such a night and we ended up having to park on the street. On the way in, I remembered the Chuck Norris card, so I started telling my wife about it. My wife used to play Magic: The Gathering* occasionally, so she is familiar with the concepts, but it occurred to me she might not be familiar with the subject of this particular card, so before giving her the details, I decided to explain it.

Me: “Today I saw this fake Chuck Norris Magic card that somebody made … Are you familiar with Chuck Norris jokes?”
Wife: “No.”
Me: “They’re jokes about how tough Chuck Norris is. Like, ‘When Chuck Norris does pushups, he doesn’t push himself up; he pushes the Earth down’.”
Wife: “Okay.”
Me: “So anyway, this fake Magic card said—”
Wife: “He’s a game show host, right?”
Me (after recovering from a fit of laughter picturing Chuck Norris as a game show host): “No, no, Chuck Norris is not a game show host. Chuck Norris is a famous movie star and martial artist. You may be thinking of Chuck Woolery. Different Chuck.”
Wife: “Oh.”
Me: “Chuck Norris was also on the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger—”
Wife: “But he could be a game show host.”
Me (beat): “Well, I don’t suppose anyone would tell him he couldn’t.”

I never did get to explain the Chuck Norris Magic card to her, but much later I came up with a Chuck Norris joke for the situation: “Chuck Norris became a game show host and won all the cash and prizes himself even though he was ineligible.”

* She always played a burn deck, which I would prepare for her, and in a multiplayer situation she would usually focus it on me because, she would say, “You have the most dangerous deck”. I am pretty sure that by “dangerous” she meant “annoying“.