question: Why aren't memes called jokes?
comment: "Meme" originally referred to a concept in memetics, which is a study of how culture evolves. A meme is a unit of cultural data, much like how a gene is a unit of biological data. Like genes being passed down to a new generation, memes are passed and propagate through culture; successful ones replicate more often, and may mutate into different forms. An example of a meme might be "giving a high five." The high five started in the 1970s, and quickly "reproduced" and spread widely. It mutated into other gestures, like the fist bump. Back in the 90s (or earlier), people started using "meme" to refer to anything that spreads online in a similar fashion. A "meme" could be a questionnaire which you fill out and then send to your friends for them to fill out; it could be a funny picture you share with your friends; it could be a forum signature. By the mid-00s, "meme" took on its more specific meaning used today. They are often jokes, but not always.
passages: The folklorist Robert Georges has summed up the concerns with these existing classification systems: It has proven difficult to organise all different elements of a joke into a multi-dimensional classification system which could be of real value in the study and evaluation of this (primarily oral) complex narrative form.
   Purpose and character of use weighs in against memes which have been used for commercial purposes because then the work has not been created for the communication of humour but for economic gain. For example, Grumpy Cat won $710,001 in a copyright lawsuit against the beverage company Grenade which used the Grumpy Cat image on its roasted coffee line and t-shirts.
   Any joke documented from the past has been saved through happenstance rather than design. Jokes do not belong to refined culture, but rather to the entertainment and leisure of all classes. As such, any printed versions were considered ephemera, i.e., temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. Many of these early jokes deal with scatological and sexual topics, entertaining to all social classes but not to be valued and saved.
   Memes generally do not have an effect on the potential market for a work. There must be no intention on part of the infringer to compete with the original owner of the work and derive profits from it. Since memes are generally meant for comedic value and have no intention to supplant the market of the original creator, they would be squarely fall within the ambit of this section.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Cliché
  
  BULLET::::- List of Internet phenomena
  
  BULLET::::- Memetics
  
  BULLET::::- Remix culture
  
  Section::::Further reading.
   In copyright law, ideas cannot get copyright protection but the expression of an idea can be protected. This is fundamental to copyright law. This means that the form and manner in which an idea is expressed is protected not the idea itself. This was given in the case of Baker v. Selden. Since a meme is essentially a comment, satire, ridicule or expression of an emotion it constitutes the expression of an idea.
   I've often started off with a lawyer joke, a complete caricature of a lawyer who's been nasty, greedy, and unethical. But I've stopped that practice. I gradually realized that the lawyers in the audience didn't think the jokes were funny and the non-lawyers didn't know they were jokes.
  
  E. B. White has joked about humor, saying that "[h]umor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind."
   The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another media to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the traditional ones ("word of mouth", printed media, sound recording, radio, film, and TV). In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET, e-mail, Usenet newsgroups (e.g., rec.humor and alt.humor), bulletin board systems..., and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication. A popular form of internet humour is found in the form of 'internet memes'. 'Memes' are almost akin to an inside joke among the internet, once a meme is overused to the point where no humour is gained from it, it is considered 'dead' or 'stale'.
   Folklore and cultural anthropology have perhaps the strongest claims on jokes as belonging to their bailiwick. Jokes remain one of the few remaining forms of traditional folk literature transmitted orally in western cultures. Identified as one of the "simple forms" of oral literature by in 1930, they have been collected and studied since there were folklorists and anthropologists abroad in the lands. As a genre they were important enough at the beginning of the 20th century to be included under their own heading in the Aarne–Thompson index first published in 1910: Anecdotes and jokes.
   BULLET::::- In 2018, a Massachusetts firefighter was reprimanded for a response to a call about a cat stuck in a tree. The firefighter told the caller that the cat would probably make its own way down, and that he had never seen a cat skeleton in a tree before. An opinion article in "Fire Chief" magazine said that these kind of jokes were common in the fire service, but would be inappropriate to share with a concerned member of the public.
  
  Section::::Examples.:Other.
   Joke cycles circulated in the recent past include:
  
  Section::::Joke cycles.:Tragedies and catastrophes.
   Though animutations are close in relation to the random nonsense of dadaism and can be entirely unpredictable, they sometimes exhibit recurring memes among them as a result of being influenced by each other and internet culture. Among the many recurring motifs found in animutations are:
  
  BULLET::::- The inclusion of Colin Mochrie from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" Regularly, a picture of Mochrie's head superimposed into a crudely drawn sun is also used. This inclusion is largely due to Neil Cicierega's fixation on the comedian.
   Self-referential humor is sometimes combined with breaking the fourth wall to explicitly make the reference directly to the audience, or make self-reference to an element of the medium that the characters should not be aware of.
  
  Old Comedy of Classical Athens is held to be the first—in the extant sources—form of self-referential comedy. Aristophanes, whose plays form the only remaining fragments of Old Comedy, used fantastical plots, grotesque and inhuman masks and status reversals of characters to slander prominent politicians and court his audience's approval.
  
  Section::::Examples.
   Joe Rogan said, "People take plagiarism so seriously in all other forms of media, whether it's music, newspapers, books, but with comedy, it's like, 'You're on your own, fucker.'"
  
  The internet, however, has opened up a new medium for "outing" a hack. Websites like YouTube allow users to upload videos and share them with others. This has made it much easier to show evidence of joke thievery in a public forum.
   Robert Beard, a professor emeritus of linguistics at Bucknell University, told an interviewer that "The first thing people always write in [to his website] about is funny words". Beard's first book was "The 100 Funniest Words in English", and among his selected words are "absquatulate", "bowyangs", "collywobbles", "fartlek", "filibuster", "gongoozle", "hemidemisemiquaver", and "snollygoster".
  
  Section::::Rudeness and entropy.
   17 U.S.C. § 102 enumerates the subject matter over which copyright could be enjoyed namely, literary work, musical work; dramatic work; pictorial; graphical and cultural works; motion pictures, etc. Broadly memes could fall under any of the heads of pictorial, graphical or motion picture.
   BULLET::::8. Repeat from step 3 about every two months.
  
  On the opposite side, unlike previous technical means, internet as a whole eliminates censorship and self-censorship of humor. For example, before the Internet extremely sick jokes, such as dead baby jokes, were almost exclusively spread orally.
  
  Internet blurred the lines between written and spoken in terms of language use and the directness of speech, between what is permitted in private and in public. Also, YouTube blurred the distinction between a spoken and recorded joke, in that the narrator is actually present.
   Section::::Origins.
   "'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même."
  
  Section::::History.:Maturity.
   Vaudeville words can be found in Neil Simon's 1972 play "The Sunshine Boys", in which an aging comedian gives a lesson to his nephew on comedy, saying that words with "k" sounds are funny:
  
  Richard Wiseman, a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a small experiment to determine whether words with a "k" sound were actually considered funnier than others for English speakers. His LaughLab tested the degree of funniness among a family of jokes based on animal sounds; the joke rated the funniest was also the one with the most "k" sounds:
   Monkey Tuesday: Hosts Penn Jillette and Michael Goudeau read emails and took calls from listeners with stories about chimpanzees, orangutans and other primates, yet because monkey is a "funnier" word, all were referred to as monkeys.
   Some claim that humour should not be explained. Author E.B. White once said, "Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." Counter to this argument, protests against "offensive" cartoons invite the dissection of humour or its lack by aggrieved individuals and communities. This process of dissecting humour does not necessarily banish a sense of humour but begs attention towards its politics and assumed universality (Khanduri 2014).
   Many modern memes stem from nonsense or otherwise unrelated phrases that are then repeated and placed onto other formats. One example of this is "they did surgery on a grape," from a video of a da Vinci Surgical System performing test surgery on a grape. People sharing the post tended to add the same caption to it ("they did surgery on a grape"), and eventually created a satirical image with several layers of captions on it. Memes such as this one continue to propagate as people start to include the phrase in different, otherwise unrelated memes.
   BULLET::::- The Italian association of Gay Parents (Agedo): "Is it really so amusing to offend millions of gay people with such vulgarity? Satire is not about opinions, or the orientation of people or their innate identities. What would have been the reaction if these offensive remarks had been made about people of colour, women, Jews or the disabled?"
   BULLET::::- In late 1964, Juliette Gréco and Françoise Sagan popularized a basic version of the game under the name of "Game of in-memoriam", which was widely exchanged among the circle of Parisians.
  
  BULLET::::- In early 1965, Paris Match, in its first issue of the year, number 823, made it widely-known across France, and published over several weeks the best "in-memoriam" from its readers.
  
  BULLET::::- In 1978, Georges Perec created an example in "":
  
  Section::::History.:The first Mr. and Mrs. jokes.
   Section::::Television.
  
  BULLET::::- "The Comedian" ("Playhouse 90"), a 1957 live drama written by Rod Serling and directed by John Frankenheimer
  
  BULLET::::- "The Comedians" (1971 TV series), a British television show of the 1970s and mid-1980s
  
  BULLET::::- "The Comedians" (2015 TV series), a 2015 FX comedy starring Billy Crystal and Josh Gad
  
  BULLET::::- Comedians ("Beavis and Butt-Head"), an episode of the TV series "Beavis and Butt-Head"
  
  Section::::Music.
  
  BULLET::::- "The Comedians" (Kabalevsky), a 1940 concert suite by Dmitry Kabalevsky
  
presuppositions: All memes are jokes. Memes are the same thing as jokes.
corrections: the term meme refers to anything that passes through culture and changes over time.  Memes are often jokes but not always.
raw_presuppositions: All memes are jokes. Memes are the same thing as jokes.
raw_corrections: the term meme refers to anything that passes through culture and changes over time.  Memes are often jokes but not always.