[Gallagher]

no, no, the concept of memes is very, very old.

looking at the greater picture of memes, there's the socio-evolutionary memes that are long term ideas/adaptations that hang around for decades, if not hundreds of years at one extreme, and then there's the proliferative, fast-paced image based internet memes like you're thinking of now.

so i would argue that dad jokes are a sort of inbetween, because despite not always having the internet to facilitate their rapid spread, the vast majority of dad jokes and puns are something that live in the collective mind that reaches through multiple areas, times, and cultures.

you could even look at the spread of email humor as a type of meme, and very much a prerequisite to what we currently think of as memes within internet culture.

it's all memes, man

memes all the way down