Why does the boy say stamps cost $30?

In the second episode of the first season of Resident Alien, there is the following dialog between a boy and an alien:

-- If you work at the post office, how much does a stamp cost?

-- $100.

-- I knew it! You’re him!

-- $1,000.

-- I know it’s you, and guess what, alien, you can’t kill me. My parents know you’re after me, and if I die, they’ll know you did it, and you’re dumb. Stamps are, like, 30 bucks each, stupid.

(Implying the alien works at a post office and knows for sure how much stamps cost.)

How is that possible? Is it a mistake, or is it possible for a stamp to cost that much?

Update. The scene is as following: a boy asks an alien who pretends to work at a post office how much a stamp cost. The alien answers $100 first and $1000 as a second guess. The scene means to show that the alien misses some general knowledge about the human world and that proves he is lying to the boy. Then the boy tells how much the stamp actually costs and calls the alien "stupid" (for not knowing).

Is seems weird to me though that a post stamp could cost that much. It seems that the boy-actor just made a mistake. Or it may be that I am missing something. Wanna know for sure.

realism resident-alien

Best Answer

Although I haven’t seen the scene in question, this sounds like a common form of a joke that you see in various comedies. A character says something incorrect, and then another character laughs at him and corrects him; except the correction is also wrong.

Normally, the joke works because it is showing that one character is stupid or wrong, while the other character, who thinks they’re so smart for knowing that the first character is wrong, is also just as dumb.

In this case, the kid would just be ignorant of how much things like stamps cost, because kids don’t have to deal with money themselves.