Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to mean "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation."

I wondered what he’d think of it evolving to mean primarily "silly bad internet joke" these days. Evidently he told us what he thought, somewhat, back in 2012:

It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important subset of memes today.