"Recently I heard a woman say her department is full of freaks, they don’t like her, and she doesn’t have a life, but that sounded more like a whine than an epiphany."

"I’m no sociologist so I don’t know if this era is less interesting. You’d think people would be as tormented by sex, self-fulfillment, and relationships (and babies) as ever, but I’m not hearing it on any movie lines I’ve been on lately. Maybe I should ask the NSA."

Said Stan Mack in a 2013 interview on the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Stan Mack drew the fantastic cartoon "Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies" that ran in The Village Voice from 1974 to 1995. The words in the cartoons were all things Mack claims to have heard people say around New York City. I, myself, had long loved the absurdity of the partial conversations you'd overhear as you walked around or half-minded your own business in a restaurant or shop. Here's an example showing part of one week's Stan Mack cartoon:



If you like that, you can order a collection of the funnies — remember when we called the comics "the funnies"? — here (at Amazon).

In the quote that begins in the post title, Mack is comparing the words he used to overhear with the words he overhears today, which, unlike then, include a lot of talking into cell phones. In fact, the reason I was looking up Stan Mack this morning is because I read (on Facebook) this post by Annie Gottlieb:

Really, the things you hear on the street. People on their cellphones seem to assume they’re in a soundproof phone booth, and people just conversing seem to have been made unselfconscious or oblivious by phone culture to being either intrusively loud, or private and overheard. You hear some funny things.

(a woman on her cellphone, crossing the street, indignantly: ) “I don’t want ANY bacteria.” (Apparently no one has yet broken the news about the microbiome.)

(Young man to his girlfriend, walking along holding hands, conversationally) “You know how some people jerk off just to jerk off?” (as opposed to?)

(today) “Hydroglyphics”

ADDED: Did people become less self-conscious because of cellphones? It's very hard to compare what you're hearing now with what you heard back then. Stan Mack is kind of an authority on the subject, and the difference he cites is in the interestingness. If what people are saying these days is less interesting, it could be that people are more private, less prone to revealing themselves when they can be overheard. But it could be that the eavesdropper has changed, and not just because we've all gotten older. We're different because we're listening to phone talkers, not to people who are with other people and talking in the flesh. People talking into a phone irritate us a lot more, so we're more judgmental. We think they're intruding on us. When we listen to people who are together in real life — as in "Real Life Funnies" — we feel that we are intruding on them. Our transgression makes things inherently more interesting.