He has obviously found a single interest that really engages him… That is a very ‘seductive’ thing for autistic people.
One suggestion is that if he is dropping jokes that are not landing, ask him what he wants to achieve when he’s making these jokes… It might well be that he simply hasn’t grasped the fact that not everyone speaks the same language that he has discovered.
The world is such a puzzling place to autistic people at the best of times, and it really is possible that he just assumes that everybody else understands these memes in the same way that everybody else seems to understand so many things that are a mystery to him.