Assume for the sake of argument, the statement is correct.

This quote does not expose a fallacy, that is an error in reasoning. There is nothing in this quote to indicate the rationality shortcoming that causes people to believe the incorrect statement. Rather this exposes an error of fact. The rationality question is why do people come to believe errors of fact and how we can avoid that.

You may be reading the sunk cost fallacy into this quote, or it may be in an unquoted part of the original article, but I don't see it here. If the rest of the article better elucidates rationality techniques that led Adams to come to this conclusion, then likely the wrong extract from the article was selected to quote.

Making one's point in a memorable (including humorous) way may be an instrumental rationality technique. That is, it helps to convince other people of your beliefs. However in my experience it is a very bad epistemic rationality technique. In particular it tends to overweight the opinions of people like Adams who are very talented at being funny, while underweighting the opinions of genuine experts in a field, who are somewhat dry and not nearly as amusing.