"What's in a name? That which we call a meme, by any other name would be as dank."
So, before I get into the real answer to the question, I want to get into what a "meme" actually is in the scholarly sense, which is a little more expansive than it is in colloquial usage. The word's meaning has evolved a lot since it first emerged, and I'm basically gonna do a quick survey of its transition from academic use to everyday use, and then go into what sorts of things would qualify as a meme that existed before the word itself. (To some degree I'll be recycling some research I did on an essay for college several years, but I don't have access to all the sources I used then.)
Though I'll be upfront now: this will be a linguistic answer more than a cultural one. There won't be any real focus on "meme like jokes". A lot can be said about the inside jokes of different cultures, but I'm not the one who can say much about them.
#Evolution of the word "meme"
So, the year is 1976, and biologist Richard Dawkins releases a new book, The Selfish Gene, a book about evolution from a gene-centric perspective rather than of organisms (his argument is… something about how natural selection serves to let genes replicate and survive, as individuals are merely vehicles for their genes, rather than serving to help individuals survive, or something like that. Biology isn't my strong suit). Toward the end of the book, he includes a chapter titled "Memes: the new replicators", where he seeks to cross-apply his biological arguments to culture, as a way of explaining how cultural transmissions happen between humans. He lacked a word for the cultural equivalent of a gene, so in the chapter he coins one:
We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. '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 meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
Some may find this etymology underwhelming, but I find it hilarious. Dawkins goes on to explain that, under this definition, potential memes include
[…] tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.
You'll notice that there isn't a heavy slant toward jokes or humor. While some of these examples can be comedic, that wasn't an intrinsic element to his definition. As long as it's a 'unit of culture' capable of being transmitted—which includes, but isn't limited to, jokes—it is a meme. And when you consider that fact, there are plenty of things that would qualify as a 'meme' from before the 20th century. They certainly couldn't spread as fast or far as they do today, but there were certainly all sorts of fads out there over the centuries, at the very least within certain pockets of societies.
Now, let's take a look at a Google Ngram of the word "meme" in the decades since The Selfish Gene. For the next decade, there isn't a fluctuation in how often it comes up, though there is a gradual upward trend. When Dawkins published the book, he imagined "meme" to be a throwaway word used for the sake of this chapter, and then be irrelevant (he later wrote, "Chapter 11 [Memes: The New Replicators] will have succeeded if the reader closes the book with the feeling that DNA molecules are not the only entities that might form the basis for Darwinian evolution. My purpose was to cut the gene down to size, rather than to sculpt a grand theory of human culture."). But it slowly caught on within academia. When I originally did this research a few years ago, I did a Google search for the word "meme" restricted to content published before around 1995, and only found academic results (and some irrelevant stuff in foreign languages), but it's hard to, er, replicate that today, because the way Google indexes news articles really shits on the concept of filtering your results. So you may just have to trust me when I say: until the late 1990s, "meme" was rarely if ever used in colloquial discourse, but it became a popular way for sociologists, anthropologists, and other scholars who study people and culture to discuss how ideas get transmitted. Memetics basically became a new field of study.
This trend picked up in the 90s, with papers like "Imitation and the Definition of a Meme" (Susan Blackmore, 1998) and "The Meme-Ing of Folklore" (Kenneth Pimple, 1996). These articles more or less stuck with Dawkins's definition, fine-tuning it a bit to encompass the discoveries and realizations they'd made after utilizing the idea that units of culture get replicated. Some of these studies observed how the creation and spread of a meme can, as one writer notes, "crystallize whole schools of thought," creating an easy source of metaphors or references or other kinds of vocabulary that affect how people tend to observe and describe the world and things around them. Oxford started considering the word for entry to the dictionary in 1988, and Merriam-Webster added it in 1998. Dawkins caught onto this trend, and in a later edition of The Selfish Gene, he noted, "The word meme seems to be turning out to be a good meme."
But the 90s is also when the word starts to enter the popular consciousness, and that's thanks largely to the internet. Merriam-Webster identifies a 1998 interview on CNN as the first usage of 'meme' in reference to an internet joke ("[…] And the next thing you know, his friends have forwarded it on and it's become a net meme." / "Net meme—the Wired Style guide calls a meme a 'contagious idea.'") However, I think MW is ignoring a crucial predecessor, and it's one that I think will blow everyone's minds. From my research, the earliest usage of it was from a 1994 Wired article titled "Meme, Counter-meme" by Mike Godwin.
Now, anyone who has spent a bit of time on Reddit (or the rest of the internet) may recognize that name. And you should: that very article is the origin of Godwin's Law, the idea that any argument online, given enough time, will eventually lead to arguers comparing the other to Hitler/Nazis. Godwin felt there was a meme developing on the Net of the day where people were quick to make inappropriate Nazi comparisons, thereby externalizing and internalizing a much more trivial look at the horrors of the Holocaust (as he writes, "the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope"). So he built a 'counter-meme', Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies, and injected this observation (labelling it as "Godwin's Law") whenever these discussions devolved to that point. Other people started quoting his law in similar situations, and it really caught on, while his meme 'mutated' as others wrote their own Net laws. Godwins reflects on the power of his meme, and the realization that memes can be a powerful force on the Net and the world (he mentions something about memes impacting stock prices… imagine that happening), and wonders about the moral responsibilities we have when creating and spreading them.
As far as I can tell, Godwin is the first person to apply the word "meme" to trends on the Internet. If we return to our Ngram, we'll see that a much bigger upward trend starts not long after this article is published. 'Internet meme' becomes a way to describe jokes and humor templates found in internet culture, and over the next couple decades (breaching the parameters of the 20-year rule), 'meme' gradually (and then, around 2014 or so, rapidly) enters popular discourse as a word simply meaning some sort of joke or image found online. Today, the word "meme" encompasses a whole lot of different meanings, including the classical 'academic' one and the various 'internet' ones. For years I argued (like a dirty prescriptivist) that people were using it wrong when they described a single image as a meme, but eventually I accepted that while they were wrong at first, the wrong definition became an accepted one as the word evolved in meaning. I feel nothing quite captures this phenomenon quite as well as the experience of reading in 2021 (or 2017, as I initially did) this sentence from Kenneth Pimple's essay, written in 1996:
For thousands of years now, human beings have survived because we have good genes and good memes; we could not have survived without our memes.
In the context it was written, it makes perfect sense, but it is so hard to take seriously now.
Okay, that was a long way to go to say Yes, memes did exist throughout humanity. Continued below, I wanna take a quick look at some memes that existed prior to the popularity of the internet and television/film. Some of this will overlap with the period of the radio and telegraph lines, but still not as contemporary as memes spawned on Reddit or 4chan or wherever else these things come from today.