Sometime around 1978 or '78, at UCSD, I began to see ‘YEEN’, a crudely drawn grinning face on bathroom stalls. Whatever or whoever YEEN was I do not know, but I do know that not long thereafter he appeared on the play money/scrip that was printed up for one of our annual Casino Night charity events.
Is Biffy The Elephant Shrew in the house? You were there around the same time, so if you know anything more about YEEN please 'fess up!
Whether there’s any help in determining a viable definition of what a meme is, or not, http://www.quickmeme.com/ has some fun stuff to check out.
No, because “jumping the shark” got its start on the Internet. The phrase was created by Jon Hein in 1997, who started the website jumptheshark.com.
“Fag Tag!”…Chicago Area circa 1995. 
Stupid.
I’m also familiar with Perdiddle and Slugbug.
One from Australia -
There was a non-alcoholic drink (presumably tasted like scotch or something) sold in the 1970s - the marketing campaign was ‘Claytons. The drink you have when you’re not having a drink’.
AS a result, the term ‘Claytons’ means - something not quite right, or just done for show. eg ‘The government held a Claytons inquiry into the corruption scandal’ (sometimes followed by the punchline - ‘The inquiry you have when you’re not having an inquiry’).
The Clayton’s drink is still sold (in tiny volumes) in Australia (but has no market presence), but the phrase is still used - just last week, a major bank was forced to apologise for some dodgy practice - it turned out to be the usual weasel-words, and I saw at least one news report referring to the ‘Claytons apology’.
I wonder if the post-70s generations are aware of where the phrase originates from…
Perhaps also the jump-rope and clapping songs…“My mommy told me,” “Miss Suzy,” “O Little Playmate,” etc.
Every joke you ever heard pre-internet. It’s amazing how what are effectively short stories spread. A punchline even functions as a kind of “parity check” to ensure that the joke doesn’t mutate too much from its original form.
Myths, fairy tales, and other folklore. Urban legends. Childhood rhymes and traditional songs sometimes survive essentially unchanged for hundreds of years, a feature that some scientists in the Human Interference Task Force proposed using to warn future humans about the dangers of nuclear waste (entertainingly talked about on 99 Percent Invisible).
The “Nigerian” scam is nearly 400 years old; the modern version, which is usually some form of copypasta, is just an updated variation.
Commercials are attempts to artificially create memes, as are the “viral” campaigns that seem to (thankfully) be dying down now.
On the other hand NONE of these things can really be memes, precisely because the word itself even exists. People didn’t do these things self-consciously–they were simply forms of amusements. Internet memes, on the other hands, are mostly done specifically with the intention of engaging in a meme above all else.
These are very cromulent posts guys.
I always wondered how the Rod Stewart had to go to the hospital to get his stomach pumped and Richard Gere and the hamster thing spread to every single fellow middle schooler that I knew. It is not like Time Magazine or 60 Minutes did a story on it or anything.
But it alludes to a Happy Days episode in which the Fonz literally jumps a shark while waterskiing. (No, it wasn’t in Lake Michigan, basically all the characters were vacationing together in California.)
In keeping with this, we all knew back in the day that [my beloved] Alice Cooper would drink whatever sick thing you could put in a cup that’d been passed around the concert venue. Similarly, some rocker was totally responsible for breaking a poor, hapless puppy’s legs on stage every night for the sheer debauchery of their audience. What a despicable bunch of fans there were in the 70s, right? 
We also got the ‘Famous Rock Star and Female News Reader who Had To Be Rushed To Emergency To have A Bottle Removed From A Delicate Area’.
I had a mate from a minor town who insisted the incident happened there since ‘They didn’t want the publicity from going to the big-city hospital’.
On the same theme, here in Aus there are a whole string of historical stories around ‘A Sportsman Doesn’t Get a Fair Go At His Club, And Keeps Being Left Off The Team Because He’s Shagging The Coach’s Daughter’.
That gets a big run, particularly around selection for the national Cricket Team (because star player from your home state/town NEVER gets selected, while THAT DUD from the other state/town somehow keeps getting a game).
Does that legend exist in the US?
Ask Chris Snee.
http://ucsdmag.ucsd.edu/magazine/vol4no2/upfront/to_editor.htm
This page has a photograph of YEEN.
How about every person/celebrity/public figure having a major victory of some sort and announcing: “I’m going to Disneyland”.
I’d say no, that was a deliberate marketing campaign.
Was Redskins (formerly Bucs) QB Doug Williams the first winning athlete to say that after winning Superbowl XXII? (Played in Jan 1988 for the 1987 season.) It seemed pretty spontaneous when I saw him say it.
The term “OK” comes from “a fad for comical abbreviations that flourished in the late 1830s and 1840s”, per Cecil. Seems like the fad was their version of LOLcats.
But people didn’t say “jumping the shark” before the Internet. It didn’t become a meme until the website popularized it.