I believe a meme is something that breeds and spreads with its own momentum, evolving over time with each passing-on. A trope is more descriptive of a format that may be re-used in order to convey a specific idea or feeling.

Thinking of film, for instance, I’d call the “Strong Female Character” a meme, and the “cliffhanger plot twist” a trope.

Meme is a joke. Trope is a figure of speech.
Tropes are used in works of media to express the meaning, create certain effect or build the plot (or everything around the plot). Memes are cheap, short catchphrases and jokes. “jokes”

Truth be told I don’t see any similarities between the two. Some memes may look like figures of speech, but generally speaking, they don’t seem to have any similarities.

@Sneki95 – I think your definition is a bit narrow. Memes can be jokes (and often are) but that’s not necessarily a requirement.

I see memes are simple, easily recognizable, short ideas or concepts.

I think @Seek pretty much nails it. A meme is usually humorous and goes viral, such examples are Chuck Norris jokes, arrow to the knee or the lolwut pear. And some do evolve, the craziest thing I’ve seen was the my little pony meme which started a whole craze. Even spawned communities and documentaries about “bronies and pegasisters”, and included other memes within itself.

Thing is memes are something which appear to have come with the internet and its various communities, meaning that one has to be somewhat familiar with the source material and sometimes the communities that turn them into memes. Meme history is pretty interesting too as they don’t always work the same. For example the “Gogo is Adlai Stevenson” meme began as a rumor but was turned into a meme, as in, it spread around and people laughed at the rumor. But this was long ago, before memes were a regular thing on the net, and if you have no idea who Gogo is or what Final Fantasy VI is, then it shows my point about having to be somewhat familiar with certain things to grasp the nature of the meme.

Tropes are ideas and concepts that define something specific, and because tropes revovle around concepts which keep occurring regularly, they become the definition of something.

The movie “Final Girl”, borrows a trope, as final girl is known to horror fans as the female protagonist who survives until the end while everyone else dies. Or “the black guy always dies first”, or again, every functioning hospital in horror movies are not abandoned, but always really empty for some reason. Reoccurring ideas that cement concepts.

There is a website called TV Tropes which lists hundreds of tropes and names them.

Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his book, The Selfish Gene. The original idea was that a meme was analogous to a gene. It was a configuration within the mind that represented an idea and which could be transferred from one person to another. Meme transmission satisfies the three criteria for evolution: 1. It can be passed on; 2. It can vary; and 3 there is a selection process which will favor some members over others.

A lot of people think that the idea of a meme is a gross oversimplification, but it does call attention to the way that culture evolves at a much faster pace than our physical selves.