He wasn't critiquing snarky jokes[1], he was critiquing the fact that your snarky joke was badly constructed and didn't correctly cut to the point you were trying to make. Which means your snark, instead of reading as funny and biting, read as trite and less relevant.
Maybe I need to take a break, lest my snark jump the-- no, that's too obvious.
My point was, "If Y Combinator is actually funding Bitcoin startups, they're dipping into the taint-bottom of the barrel and need to take stock." I thought that some Ascii art might lighten the mood surrounding cultural calamity. Funding good-faith business failures is inevitable and fine-- it's an unpredictable game-- but funding Bitcoin is an obvious sign of a decision not given enough time.
Of course, he and you are right that the shark-jumping metaphor is clumsy if we're looking for exact correspondence. Incubators work in parallel and a single bad decision is macroscopically inconsequential. It's not like a sequential narrative (from which the shark-jump motif comes) where one bad segment can set the whole thing off. I didn't actually mean that this suggests terminal decline, only that YC miiiiight want to be more thoughtful/selective if it's actually at the point of funding Bitcoin startups.
Anyway, I'm off to go create a currency out of mediocre Internet humor. It's called BitClown. Anyone want in? 0.1% equity, unlimited vacation, free beer and abundant bad jokes.
[1] I mean, clearly not, he snarks all the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428558