I'd say that, yeah - some of the subheadings are pop culture references, and there are occasional jokes scattered among the text. Like, when discussing the origin of the protolanguage that Indo-European languages descended from:

It's fair to say that the problem of the location of the Indo-European homeland, called "the Urheimat" (German for "original homeland"), has been a subject of controversy - indeed, the question has had a tendency to drive men mad. Various fruitcakes have suggested Tibet, North Africa, the shores of the Pacific, and the North Pole. There's a distinct tendency for scholars to place the wellspring of the European peoples somewhere in their own backyard. So far, thank God, we haven't seen any American linguists try that.