A clever or insightful joke may be upvoted, particularly if it is followed by thoughtful exploration of the topic. But "one liners," like your example, are just lazy and offer no insight or in any way elevate the conversation.
Generally speaking if you want lazy retorts and memes, Reddit or Twitter already caters to that very well. HN is something else, and two things can exist to fill different niches.
We really don't. It's not difficult to find plenty of hyperbole, boilerplate polemic and low-effort cynicism which gets voted up (or at least not voted down) and many comments here have no more effort or insight put into them than a joke or a meme. Most people here don't even seem to bother reading the linked articles, they just riff on whatever they think the title is about on first glance.
It's mostly elitism. Jokes and memes are associated with the commoners on Reddit and there is nothing Hacker News despises so much as being considered common.
It's also particularly ironic, given how many brilliant thinkers also had great (and sometimes even puerile) senses of humor. There was plenty of humor on USENET and BBSs in the halcyon days of hacker culture that HN looks back on so fondly. Obviously humor and intellect aren't inversely related but a lot of people here seem to believe so.
There's lots of crap on HN. Because it's still the internet. Just because there's a lower ratio of crap because it's HN doesn't mean people won't go out of their way to crap on it.
Example: On designers worrying about losing work to 99designs...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2378303
Stupid joke to illustrate a point, followed by actionable advice.