People-watching in New York City is common entertainment. But people-listening — that’s where the real fun is.

In New York, everyone looks like a freak. But only a select few talk like one.

During my adventures this summer, I jotted down some of the interesting things I overheard on the streets of Manhattan in hopes of having a few good answers to the question heard 100 times a day this week: “What did you do this summer?”

So here are a few highlights spoken directly from the mouths of New York’s finest:

On a train ride to Pleasant Point Beach, New Jersey, a few miles north of where that leotard-wearing Jesse punk annoyed us from the MTV Beach House, the passenger next to me asked the train conductor “Where do you get off for Pleasure Point?”

During a weekend stroll through Times Square, I caught a porn-house promoter using the following line to woo passers-by into the theater: “Don’t go see ‘Godzilla.’ He dies in the end.”

A comedian at an all-night comedy club got a few laughs with this clever observation: “New York City is the city that never sleeps. That’s why it looks so bad in the morning.”

But it was a member of the crowd who stole the show that particular evening. Between acts, the emcee was starting into a joke when an older man near the back stood up and attempted to walk out.

The emcee proceeded to interrupt the gentleman. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “Where do you think you are going?”

And with no hesitation whatsoever, the man responded, “To take a shit.”

The runner-up “shit comment” is courtesy of the New York Police Department.

After a half-hour fireworks show along the East River, the entire district of Manhattan decided to leave their positions on FDR Boulevard at the exact same time, causing a pedestrian traffic jam straight out of “Independence Day.”

As a crowd of thousands marched down the center of a busy street, the crossing guard on duty mumbled, “Ahh shit.”

When Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell announced her departure from the Spiced Ones, a New York newspaper asked readers (I’m cheating on this one) who should replace the missing Spice.

One reader wrote in suggesting Yoko Ono and had this hilarious reasoning: “She broke up the Beatles, the least she could do is keep the Spice Girls together.”

During an intimate moment of a Semisonic show at the Bowery Ballroom, lead singer Dan Wilson stopped in the middle of song to tell a 6’6″ happy-go-lucky fan (who had the bad habit of turning around and singing to his friends in the balcony) to “get your own fucking band.”

A fellow intern made just as big of a fool out of herself when she looked out her cab window and noticed a sign that read: “Honking — $350 fine.”

“Do they enforce that, do you think?” she asked.

But the funniest and by far the strangest thing I people listened to this summer was … everything I said.

A street “performer” in Washington Square, wearing a rainbow dress and construction boots lined in pink sequins, called himself Echo Man and had a routine consisting of repeating everything I and everyone in the park said.

Needless to say, he wasn’t making much money.

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Corey Moss is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.