No it is not. A meme is an concept, phrase, fashion, style, image or other thing representing an idea that becomes popular, or at least widely shared, spreading virally so that it takes on a life of its own being widely recognised, often carrying multliple layers of meaning. It is similar to a fashion, but tends to be more specifically defined. So a fashion can be a meme if it has additional depth of meaning, but not all fashions are memes. A meme might be a phrase or symbol such as "WWG1WGA" or "Orange man bad", which are instantaneously recognised with multiple layers of depth by those who know the background, but may be meaningless to those not yet introduced to the idea. A given cat video may not be a meme, but the idea of cat videos. People most frequently encounter memes in the form of an image with words printed on it which is shared widely across social media. The image might change, but the phrase does not. A meme might be an image style, such as the NPC image which is used in multiple scenarios - same image styling but different words and contexts. The linking factor is the idea the image represents.
Meme's may often be amusing, in fact the best memes (in terms of popularity) - particularly image based ones are often going to owe their take-up to the humour they embody, but the idea they represent is what will spread them through sharing.
A meme stock, I would expect, would be one that has become widely discussed and shared, representing an idea as well as a thing, so it takes on a life of its own. In the context of a meme-stock at this point given the events surrounding GameStop I suspect the implication is one of "sticking it to the man" as well as straight popularity on the said forumns. I would expect that "viral stock" would have been a better term, but "viral" has been overused over the last few years and I suspect the concept of "meme" is starting to be used in place of it, potentially losing some of the additional meaning behind the term.
The most common memes are images with words, which until recently were a way to convey ideas while bi-passing automated censoring systems. The image changes, but the words stay the same. Advances in image processing AI have made these less effective of late than they once were. Hence the last 12 months has seen a rise in images representing an idea rather than a constant phrase itself so the image or part there-of stays constant while the words change. The NPC character being a god example of this.
While the meme may, and often is, holding the target up for ridicule it is by no means a necessity for it to do so for it to be a meme.
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