Humour is the third element in Shifman's typology to analysing memes. She asserts that humour can provide unique insight into culture and believes it is a central element for successful memes. For the most part, humour is universal and can be observed within a vast host of societies and understood by individuals from many cultural backgrounds. Lankshear and Knobel break down the distinct patterns within memes that are considered to be key contributors to their fecundity. The prevalent theme is that there is always an element of humour, ranging from quirky parodies to the outright disgusting, through to the acerbically ironic. The element of humour is conveyed through intertexuality such as cross-references to different everyday or popular cultural events, icons or phenomena, or creative juxtapositions of images, video clips or music lyrics.
These ideas can also be applied to analysing basketball memes. The predominant structure of basketball memes is to attempt to share one's feelings through humour. As noted by Lankshear and Knobel, there can be various notions of humour, from sarcastic wit, to the outrageously bizarre or harmful personal attacks. In terms of basketball memes, these can from Brian Scalabrine's lack of playing time, Lebron James's receding hairline, Anthony Davis's uni-brow, Chris Bosh's facial features, the perceived compromising of fair play due to crooked referring or administrative decisions, and so on.
