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A monologue from the play by Neil Simon
Barney
Just sit there. Don’t talk, don’t cough, don’t even breath. Just sit there and shut up until I tell you you can go.
If I get nothing else from you today, it’s going to be your undivided goddamned attention.
I’m sure it will come as no great shock to you, but you are the first “attempted” extramarital affair for me in twenty-three years of marriage.
I’ve never even kissed another woman. In twenty-three years.
I got married to my high school sweetheart-and when have you heard that expression last-at the age of twenty-four, having gone steady with her since I was sixteen.
And how many experiences with other women do you think I’ve had prior to getting married?…One! I had one shot at it.
When I was eighteen my brother took me to an apartment in Newark, New Jersey, where I consorted with a forty-four-
year-old woman who greeted me lying naked on a brass bed reading the newspaper. It cost me seven dollars and I threw up all night.
I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble, and you’ve had more to drink this afternoon than I’ve had in my whole life.
I’ve never had a car accident, never had a fistfight, never had a broken bone, never had a temperature over a hundred and two…
Life has not only been very kind to me, it goes out of it’s way to ignore me…
I’ve got three kids I’m very proud of, a house I’ve worked very hard for and a wife who is not extraordinary,
not what you would call an exciting, vivacious woman, but one who is kind, considerate, devoted and that I happen to love.
So why after twenty-three years do I write my mother’s address on the back of a check, buy a bottle of Scotch with two glasses and pray to God I never get caught?
Why? I’ll tell you why…I don’t know. I’ve never had the urge before…Not true. I started getting the urge about five years ago.
Two years ago seriously. About a year ago I decided to give in to it, and the last six months conscientiously.
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