Lol, the word “meme” was introduced as a parallel to gene and religion was provided as an example of a very strong meme. At one point the word started to be used for memes that spread over the internet, and since most of those were image macros, a lot people came to believe that meme means “image macro”.

But jokes are a wonderful example of meme. There are jokes that have been going around since ancient times, some with almost no alterations.