And Sometimes we don't Know the Joke as Well as We Think

So here's a story from my mom's grad school days when she, Phil and Jan were roommates. Phil was giving a presentation for the math department (could it have been his dissertation?), and he had included a laugh line, but he was afraid no one would get that it was funny. So, he decided to seed the audience by telling mom and Jan what the line was so they could laugh. "Okay," he said, "When you hear the line 'And that gives the lie to Goldbach's conjecture,' that's your cue to laugh." Mom and Jan agreed. But of course (that is it's of course if you know them), Mom and Jan were MFA students and didn't know Goldbach's Conjecture from the Undecidability of the Continuum Hypothesis. So when the big moment came, Phil read out "And that gives the lie to Goldbach's conjecture," and from the fourth row came "HAAAAAAAAAW hawhawhawhawh WOOOOOOOOOheheheheh snort Ahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Ahaaaaaaaa, Hooooo hooooo Hoooo Hooo hooo..." So basically Phil was convinced he was going to be dematriculated for academic fraud and finished the rest of the paper in a manic state.

This is now family lore. One of the posts above this one makes a reference to secular trends; I argued to Mike that you don't actually have to know what a secular trend is to get the joke, and in any case anyone with a good sense of the history of the language will get it anyway. To which he responded, "Well, that gives the lie to Hasselback's conjecture."

Iceberg, Goldberg, what's the difference?