If you actually read Pomerantz’ paper on this (which is really just a letter, not a full-fledged article, and is available at
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~pomeran/GrassGreener1983.pdf) it’s clear what he is trying to do is to bring together empirical psychologists and believers in “folk wisdom” by proving the validity of an aphorism. As such it is not a joke, but more of an existence proof. Pomerantz is a respected professor of vision science and his work should not just dismissed out of hand.
The other complaint of Cecil, that “Ecological Optics” has nothing to do with ecology, shows that he is unaware of the field of ecological psychology which has been around for fifty years and studies the information available in the environment for various sense modalities, one of which involves optics.