Yes, but this is a physics professor making jokes to an audience of physics students. Why shouldn't he refer to special relativity? It's part of his training and the training of everyone who can hear him.
I'd be more surprised if the joke came from, say, the professor teaching egyptian hieroglyphics.
Apropos of nothing at the time I took it the title was 'Modern Physics' which basically was the senior physics class and covered a mix of things from some cosmology, relativity, quantum mechanics, and various papers that had come out the summer before.
