overheard in new york

so of course everybody knows this website, I stumbled across it a couple years ago, but I just remembered it again today and was reading a lot of them and think some of them are so funny.




here are some of my faves:

Guy #1: You know that Anton Webern's Quartet for the End of Time was performed in a concentration camp? Crazy.
Guy #2: Yeah. He died real weird. I forget how. I think the Nazis shot him.
Total stranger: Actually he was shot by Allied soldiers. He was breaking curfew smoking a cigarette, and they mistook him for his brother-in-law, who was an alleged Nazi spy.
Guy #1: Oh, I see. Thanks.
Total stranger: Any other questions? I just ride this train all day waiting to answer questions on twentieth-century music composition. The next car has an expert on Chekhov, and the conductor studies philosophy.
Guy #1: So anyway, Slavic girls are pretty hot.
Guy #2: Yeah, for real.

--7 train

Three-year-old playing kitchen, to adults: Does anyone want a taste of my spicy vagina?

--Lake George, New York

Older woman: Excuse me, miss?
Younger woman: Yeah?
Older woman: Your veil, your burqa is very beautiful. I didn't know your people were allowed to wear it in bright colors.
Younger woman: It's not a burqa, it's a poncho. I'm Jewish. It's for the rain. I got it at TJ Maxx.

--53rd & 7th

Woman: This is the second time I been to New York, though, 'cause last time my girl was like, "Do you like the nightlife?" and I said, "Yeah," and she was like, "Then you gotta get to the city, bitch," and I got arrested for smoking a blunt on someone's brownstone.
Man: That's terrible.
Woman: Oh no, I mean, it was like the second time I got arrested, you know, so it was like no big deal.
Man: What happened the first time?
Woman: Oh, that was just a misunderstanding. I was like 14, and I was wit' ma man, and we was having words--like, we was having a disagreement--and I stabbed him, is all. It was just a misunderstanding.

--Chinatown bus



Big thug #1: ... And I was like, 'No fuckin' way.'
Big thug #2: Yeah, nigga. That shit is like magic.
Big thug #1: I know, nigga. I did it. I went home and I ordered the new Harry Potter from Amazon. That shit came the next day. It was like magic.


--14th & 6th



The subway doors open. A hobo enters, holding a bottle of windex in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other.
Hobo: Which is the better time to read Dostyevsky? Winter?
He sprays the windex.
Hobo: Or Spring?
He squeezes toothpaste out of the tube.
Japanese girl: Spring!
Hobo: You are correct.

--F train