1-Sentence Summary: After realizing that she and her date (a mathematician) are not a good match, Sara explains to her date that while she's not interested in him as a person she was planning to get laid so can they cut the boring and tedious small talk and skip to the pleasurable part of the evening?

Appreciated: Depiction of a strong outspoken woman who knows what she wants and owns her sexuality unabashedly.

Age Range 20's
​Character's gender is female.
Monologue genre is comedic.
Find this monologue in the collection of short plays "Plays for Three" in the play "Sex with a Mathematician" by Pete Barry.
Monologue starts with the line "Listen, Shirty" and ends with "Let's skip the torture and jump right to the pleasure. (Sizes him up) In whatever quantities we can get it."

​Monologue Writing 101 Elements (0 = Not Used. 1 = Used. 2 = Strong Usage)
​1. Strong Want - 1. To get laid.
2. High Stakes - 0.5
3. Tactical Variety - 2. To break the stigma of casual sex "we're just mammals." To get him to own up to how bad the internet dating service screwed up. To set herself apart from how most women she (and likely he) knows and why she love vets by different rules. All tactics serve to sell him on the idea.
4. Hook Opener - 2. Two words grab attention, show spunk, and establish her character's persona fast. Unique word choice "Shirty."
5. Button Finish - 2. Gives the actress an active reaction to play as she sizes he guy up. Comic gold potentially here. Try different deliveries with colleagues! Humor comes from the honest emotional moment. So what genuine reaction to the guy might someone be having that would make you giggle if you witnessed it?
6. Sensory - 0
7. Internal Obstacles - 0
8. Past/Present Balance - 0. All present action here. That's a good thing! (IF a monologue is a rememberence then it must be connected to and furthering the active present moment in some way).
9. Discovery - 1. If Sara doesn't know she's going to be so blunt (until the moment she is) it will have more power than if she had planned to say it or this is a shtick she uses frequently.
10. Restraint - 1. Understanding the moment before a monologue is key here. If Sara was biting her tongue and suffering inside the whole date until this moment, then she's been restraining her frustration until this moment when she releases it. This monologue is in part fantasy fulfillment. The thing we wish we were brave enough to come out and say. Sara likely feeling no liberated as she blows past the normal human fear of hurting the person she's with to being brutally honest.
TOTAL "ELEMENT USAGE WEIGHT": 9.5

Loved this one!

Tags: Comedic female monologues, Comedic monologues for women, Womens monologues, Audition monologues for women, Contemporary monologues, Modern monologues, Monologues from published plays, comedy monologues, comedic monologues, funny monologues, humorous monologues, 1 minute monologues, hilarious monologues, monologues for young women, strong outspoken female characters, sassy monologues, monologues about dating.

1-Sentence Summary: A frustrated video store employee who just quit her job at Galaxy Video begs for it back.

Appreciated: Love the journey she takes, from struggling with the fact that she hates people (especially video store customers who ask dumb questions and put videos back in the wrong sections), looking inward to find out why (she can do that, look inward, because she "takes Yoga"), going to her and therapist to explore deeper, to realize it's because she's a talented stick figure artist. She draws stick figures!

Age Range 20's to 30's.
​Character's gender is female.
Monologue genre is comedic.
Find this monologue on page 44 of "222 Comedy Monologues: 2 Minutes and Under."

​Monologue Writing 101 Elements (0 = Not Used. 1 = Used. 2 = Strong Usage)
​1. Strong Want - 1
2. High Stakes - 0.5
3. Tactical Variety - 0
4. Hook Opener - 0.5
5. Button Finish - 1
6. Sensory - 0.5
7. Internal Obstacles - 2
8. Past/Present Balance - 2
9. Discovery - 1
10. Restraint - 1
TOTAL "ELEMENT USAGE WEIGHT": 9.5

Loved this monologue!

Tags: Comedic female monologues, Comedic monologues for women, Womens monologues, Audition monologues for women, Contemporary monologues, Modern monologues, Monologues from published plays, comedy monologues, comedic monologues, funny monologues, humorous monologues, 2 minute monologues.

In this comic monologue a man professes his lifelong love for a Maypole washing machine.

Monologue gives you a great yarn to spin plus a decent journey with emotional highs and lows to hit.

The monologue is from the short play "Soap Opera" from the collection of short plays by David Ives entitled "Time Flies and other short plays."

The monologue opens on the top of page 119 of "Time Flies and other short plays" with the line "It was as a naked crawling infant I first glimpsed it" and continues to "I was hooked." The second part begins with "The sphinx in our Oedipal basement was my mother's Maypole" and continues to "We were a perfect match." The third part starts with "A machine that's faultless and flawless" and continues to "Perfection, cubed!" The fourth part starts with "Yes. Yes. I know I'm just replacing my mother by dating a washing machine." and continues to "This machine and I are soulmates!" The fifth part starts with "Nobody understood" and closes on "The day I graduated to Maypole Repairman."

David Ives is the master of the short form play in our lifetime.  No one in the short form is as widely produced or as well known even outside the world of theatre people.  His published plays can be found in nearly every drama school library. His writing is light like a souffle, witty, warm and wise.   And yes, he's a Yale MFA grad like Durang perhaps the other darker more emotionally raw short form genius who also holds a Pulitzer.  But this post is about Ives.  If Durang is deep, painful cathartic comedy, Ives is the light brilliant uplifting counterpoint.  In any event, both write comedy, a thing perhaps too little celebrated in a life that is made infinitely better by the presence of laughter.

Alright then, the actual topic of this post, David Ives "The Green Hill."   It' a short play about a man, Jake, who everyday imagines himself if only for a few minutes atop a green hill.  The hill is a place where he is perfectly happy and at peace.  He is obsessed with finding the actual green hill.  He knows it is not just in his mind.  He goes on a journey perhaps leaving the love of his life, Sandy, behind to chase down the hill.  He discovers the hill is real when he finds a picture of it at a travel agency.  He gets the name of the late photographer and asks the photographer's wife, where is this hill?  She doesn't know!  The photographer spent his life taking pictures of green hills and didn't label where any of them were located!  However, there was a lot of everywhere he'd travelled.  So our hero Jake sets out to go to every place this photographer went in search of the hill.   

The peak of dramatic tension and the cathartic moment of realization by Jake that he no longer needs to find the hill.  He is ready to go home.  At that moment when his dream is lost, he discovers the hill.  This is the best suited moment to derive a monologue.  You will have to make some cuts to make it work, but the derived monologue works and gives you a sense of defeat and then elation to play.  And the entire play is short, a ten minute play, so read the entire thing to understand where Jake is emotionally at this moment.

Start the monologue with the line "Hill 16,973.  Every American I meet I ask for Sandy."  Skip right to "I figure Sandy's long married .. " and after "as flat as a starched bedsheet" jump to "Suddenly I can't remember what the hill I'm looking for looks like ... " and after "I'm nowhere inside my head or out of it" jump to "It's time to go home" and then to "Help a guy out?" and continue with text as-is all the way until the final line you'll end on "I've never felt so free in my life."

Get the play ​The Green Hill by David Ives here.  The monologue is derived from pages 198-200. 

Monologue for a young man. Hook opener "I'm Ben. I'm pretty stupid. I'm not going to a fancy college like you. I'm a third-tier kind of person." and closes on "...more than selfish discontent." Romantic comedy monologue of an earnest guy trying to talk his way into a woman's heart.

From page 195-196 of "Shorter Faster Funnier"

Monologue for a man. Character George Simmons. It's early morning, he's feeling disoriented and frightened. It's from the medicine he's on. He comes into Ira's room.

Actor performing this gets to play disorientation, fear, and a strong objective with panic under it, to get Ira's help to take him to the hospital. Contains some denial at how bad he is doing at the beginning. Then discovery at just how bad he feels and he needs to get to hospital ASAP.

​Starts on page 54 of the shooting script for "Funny People" with line "I couldn't sleep." Ends on page 55 with "we gotta go now"

Monologue for a man, comedic.  Character is described as "an older man" named Gaston.   The play "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" is by Steve Martin.

This monologue gives an actor a nice balance of past and present action to play.  The present action is the character's desire to understand from Picasso what it's like to come up with ideas, to be creative, to have inspiration.  He yearns to know what it must be like to be inspired; an original.  Then he recounts a failed attempt in his own life to come up with an idea to pain something: the shutters on his house.  The story he tells is actually really heart wrenching but comedically so, and the problem of coming up with an idea for the color to paint his shutters gets bigger and bigger until he actually considers taking his own life!  Finally, he decides to paint them green.  All the huge struggle over something so seemingly simple and relatively mundane/inconsequential both gives an actor a great intense journey to play, and because of the absurdity be pretty funny too.  The build of the problem is like Henri Bergson's "Snowball" effect described in his famous essay on comedy "Laughter."   As an actor you get to play all the great angst and struggle and desperation (past action) while using it as a way to convey to Picasso in right now how much you'd like to understand his process (present action).  So you've got both a big emotional ride and a strong want/objective to pursue.

Monologue starts with the line "Well, you're a painter; you're always having to come up with ideas.  What's it like?"  and ends with the line "But then one day I said to myself 'Green' and that was it."  Find it on page 55 of "Picasso at the Lapin Agile and other plays."  Get the play here. 

Monologue for a young guy, 20's. Character is Ira, a young standup just getting started. Not making his money as a standup.

In this comedic monologue Ira has to follow George Simmons, a famous standup comic, who has just done a very unfunny set in which he was clearly very depressed and reflective about his life. Ira has to follow George and has no choice but to improvise some humor about George's set.

Great chance for an actor to play the situation, which is rich in realistic detail. Ira is nervous to be performing, as he's new to standup. He's a bit thrown by what he's just witnessed Simmons do. He's reactive in the present moment commenting on audience members who rudely get up and leave during his set.

One of the strengths of this monologue is how Ira starts struggling with weak material about himself, then gains confidence as he gets on a role with the improvised material about Simmons. He's drowning up there and he saves himself by making a split second decision to shift gears and try fresh off-the-cuff material. There's a real sense of discovery for an actor playing this monologue, as your character is having these thoughts, inventing the material which is finally getting the desired response (laughter) from the audience on the spot.

On page 17 of Apatow's screenplay his lead character George, a successful celebrity standup, has a very vulnerable, very human moment. Prior to the scene he's been given a cancer diagnosis and the prognosis does not look good. Now up on stage at a comedy club, he admits he's scared and tells a few jokes about growing up in a family that didn't believe in a higher power or an afterlife. The jokes fall flat. By the end of the monologue, it's gotten so quiet in the comedy club George jokes that he can hear the freeway. No one laughs.

Some of the jokes might play as funny in audition, but really this monologue is one of George's more vulnerable and raw emotional moments in tthe movie. For a standup comic, the stage is a place where he can be honest and express what he's going through. It's a slightly sad moment as we discover he has no one he's really close to and its onstage where he's able to open up. Bearing his soul to strangers, fans, in a club.

You could certainly consider this in the category of dramatic monologue. Great balance of past/present action as his recollections about his Athiest family tie directly to the terminal diagnosis he's trying to come to terms with. And the anger, at the situation, at his father for not giving him a religious faith that could have given him comfort now, is deep and moving. He has a strong desire in the scene to connect, to find comfort for the pain he is in, to release it, to tell someone. He also is struggling wanting to recapture his life before he got the diagnosis. He wants to go onstage and be adored, like normal, and do his act, perform a short set, like he usually would. But he can't just do his standup like always. So there is great internal conflict here as well. Ahh! This monologue is just fricken deep and honest and awesome. If you're into bear your soul kinda stuff, this monologue is your bag.