What the audition actually asked for
Two rules decide whether a monologue is even admissible, and neither one appears on the pages that rank for this search. Both are published, and both are easy to check.
The first rule is where the words came from. Four of the schools we checked require a published play and say so plainly. Two others accept a screenplay. That single line decides whether the piece you spent a fortnight on is allowed in the room at all.
Now set that against the page currently ranking first. It was refreshed on 3 September 2026 and it prints eight monologues for men, of which seven are film or television. Only one is from a play, which means an actor who takes that list to RADA, Guildhall, Tisch or Glasgow has nothing at all that is eligible to perform.
The second rule is length, and here the range is wider than most actors expect. Nobody who publishes a list of monologues also publishes what the schools ask for. So here it is.
A ninety-second cut of a speech from a published play satisfies every institution in both tables above. Nothing else does. A two-minute piece is too long for Tisch and the Academy, and a film monologue is inadmissible at four of the seven.
So cut to ninety seconds and work from a play, and you have removed the only two reasons a panel can rule you out before you open your mouth.
Twenty-three comic speeches you can have for nothing
Every play below was published in 1930 or earlier, which puts it in the American public domain. Where a translation is involved we name the translator and the year, because that is the part that catches people out.
These are ranked by how usable they actually are, not by how famous they are. A speech in dense period prose is less use to you than one that plays modern, even though both are free.
Chekhov’s On the Harmfulness of Tobacco would be the best piece on this page, because it is literally a solo monologue about a man giving a lecture that turns into a confession about his marriage. We could not confirm a public domain English translation with a freely readable text, so we have left it off.
The same applies to Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters. The play is centuries old. We could not verify a free English translation, so Truffaldino is not on the list. We are not going to point you at a text and let you find out later.
Two we wrote, and you can have them
The whole page-one set recycles roughly the same twenty pieces. These two are ours, they are new, and no panel anywhere has heard either of them.
The brief. He is talking to his partner. He has already decided he is keeping it. Do not play him as a fool, because he is not one, and do not apologise with your voice while the words are arguing. The comedy is that the logic is completely airtight and completely wrong. The last line is the audition.
Before you say anything, I want you to know that I have thought about this.
I know what it looks like. It looks like a man who went out for milk and came back with a boat, and I understand why that reads badly, because that is factually the sequence of events.
But here is the thing nobody is accounting for. We were going to spend that money anyway. Not on a boat, obviously. On the kitchen. And what is a kitchen, when you actually examine it? It is a room where we are unhappy in a slightly newer way.
The boat is a different proposition entirely. The boat is a decision.
Yes. It has a hole. It has a small hole, and the man was very honest with me about the hole, which I thought spoke well of him.
(beat)
I want to say one more thing and then I will stop, and you can say whatever you like.
I have never once, in eleven years, come home with something you did not expect.
(genuinely asking)
Does that not worry you?
The brief. He is handing the keys back to a friend. He is telling the truth, in an order he has thought very carefully about. Play the care he is taking, not the panic underneath it, and let the last line arrive as though he believes it. Do not rush the middle, because the disclosures have to land one at a time.
So the car is outside. It is fine. It is completely fine.
I want to start by saying that everything which happened is technically weather.
You know the bit by the garden centre where the road dips? There is a dip. I did not put the dip there. And in the dip, on Tuesday, there was what I would describe as a lake.
Now, a braver man drives through a lake. I want to be honest with you here, because I think honesty is what this situation deserves. I am not that man. I stopped. Which is why the van behind me did what it did.
The good news is that the van driver was insured. The slightly less good news is that he was insured to drive a different van.
(beat)
The wing mirror is in the boot. I put it in the boot myself. That is me doing that.
And I know what you are going to say. You are going to say that I should have rung you on Tuesday.
But I want you to think honestly about how Tuesday you would have handled this, compared with how present-day you is handling it right now.
(with enormous generosity)
I have given you four days of growth.
You may perform them, record them, post the tape and use them in a showreel, for free, without asking. We would like a credit where a credit is possible. What you may not do is stage them commercially or sell them, and for that you would need to ask us.
Now the warning, because it matters more than the permission. Original material is inadmissible wherever a school requires a published play, which is most of them, and NYU Tisch bans it in as many words. Texas State asks applicants to avoid four named writers of standalone audition monologues, and that request exists precisely because free original pieces flooded their auditions.
So use ours for self-tapes, agent meetings, screen generals and class. For a conservatoire audition, take one of the twenty-three above instead, because those are all from published plays and all of them clear the rule.
Why a free play can still cost you money
This is the part every ranking page skips, and it is the part that actually decides what you can safely put on the internet.
The American rule is simply a date: anything first published in 1930 or earlier is in the public domain, because the term runs ninety-five years from the date of publication. Works from 1930 entered it on the first of January 2026, which is recent enough to be worth knowing.
Then comes the part that catches everybody, which is that a translation is a new work with its own copyright, and it gets its own ninety-five years running from its own publication date. The Copyright Office is explicit that protection covers only the new material, and never the public domain original underneath.
Ludvig Holberg’s Jeppe of the Hill was written in 1722, so the play is free by any measure. The translation you are most likely to find first was published in 1990 and is fully in copyright. The one published in 1914 is free.
Same play, same character and same jokes. One version you can print, record and post, and one version you cannot, and nothing on the page you land on will tell you which is which.
So the rule for anything not written in English is short: find the translator’s name and the year before you use a word of it, and if a text will not tell you who translated it, treat the thing as unusable.
The same logic applies to editions. A modern acting edition of a public domain play does not re-copyright the play, but its introduction, notes and any new material belong to the publisher. Work from a public domain source text rather than from a book with a live copyright page.
What actually gets you rejected
Not opinions from a listicle. These are published rules and named people, and several of them contradict the advice you have probably been given.
A monologue you assembled yourself
The ruleRADA tells applicants not to assemble a speech from lines that depend on another character’s interjections. Tisch says a monologue must be written as one.
Why it matters hereIt rules out the Khlestakov speech above, and a great many pieces printed on other sites that were quietly stitched together for you.
An accent you are not certain of
The ruleRADA lists it among the things not to do. Tisch is blunter and asks to hear your natural voice, with no accent added.
The trapHalf the comic writing on this page is Irish, Russian or French in translation, and none of it requires an accent to be funny.
Playing mad, drunk or out of control
The ruleRADA names these directly and says they are difficult to perform. Mountview advises against pieces built on shouting and swearing.
Why it bites comedyIt is the most common way an actor tries to make a comic speech land, and it is the one the schools warn about.
A piece with a famous performance attached
Named sourceRyan R. Williams, an on-camera coach, says that all he can hear is the iconic delivery of the original.
The costYou are no longer being watched. You are being compared, and the comparison is with a finished film.
Not having read the whole play
Named sourceStuart Howard, casting director, puts it as four words. Steven Hong at the American Academy says applicants use a monologue book to cut corners.
How it showsJuilliard warns about monologue books for the same reason, and the Academy says you may be asked contextual questions about both scripts.
Props and costume
The ruleNYU Tisch does not permit either. It is a short rule and it is easy to break by accident with a comic piece.
There is essentially only one of those in existence, and it is not remotely what you would expect. Texas State asks applicants not to perform pieces by four named writers of free standalone audition monologues, and to avoid anything that is not part of a larger work.
One of those four names is the author of the single most widely recommended free comic monologue for men on the internet. It appears on the top-ranked page twice and on three other page-one sites, so the piece being pushed hardest at you is the one piece a published list asks you not to bring.
No British drama school publishes a list at all, and two go further. Guildhall says it cannot give advice about specific monologues. RADA puts worrying about how original your choice is on its list of things not to do. Juilliard tells applicants to choose what they connect with, commonly used or obscure.
So the honest position is this. Read the specific school’s own page, and do not memorize a universal blacklist assembled from blogs, because outside Texas the blacklist does not exist.
Playing it, and the one thing the teachers do not agree on
There is a real disagreement here, and the pages that quote one side of it never mention that the other side exists.
The dominant position, and much the more useful of the two, is that you should not try to be funny at all. Gunnar Todd Rohrbacher, an on-camera comedy coach, says you do not have to prove that you are funny, and adds that characters in comedy do not generally find what is happening to them funny at all, which is the note most actors need to hear.
But John Swanbeck, a director, says something close to the opposite, holding that actors have to feel a scene is really funny for the audience to feel that it is funny. Both are published, both are experienced, and both cannot be wholly right.
What resolves it is the thing they do both agree on, and Stephen Tobolowsky puts it as plainly as anyone: there is no reason to laugh unless something is at stake. Michael Kostroff says truthful commitment to comic circumstances is what is funny, and neither of them is talking about jokes at all.
Every piece on this page is a man who wants something badly and is going about it wrongly. Doolittle wants money, Argan wants to pay less for his own medicine, and Christy Mahon wants to remain the person the rumour made him. Not one of them is trying to amuse anybody.
Play what he wants and how certain he is that he is being reasonable, and the comedy arrives on its own. Our chapter on comedic and dramatic pieces goes much further into this, including what to do when nobody in the room laughs, which is almost always.
Grading the sources
This page makes claims about schools, about copyright and about other websites, so it owes you the method on each one.
Where we differ from the standard account
Which monologues should a man bring?
Commonly saidThe same twenty pieces, recycled across every page on the first screen of results.
What we foundTwenty-three free ones the room rarely hears, with the act, the scene and the translator named.
Is a film monologue acceptable?
Commonly saidNever addressed, on any page we read, despite most of them being full of film material.
What we foundFour schools ban it outright and two allow it. It is the first thing to check and the easiest.
How long should it be?
Commonly saidNot stated. One site prints per-piece timings and no site prints what the schools ask for.
What we foundSixty seconds to three minutes depending on where you are going. Ninety seconds satisfies all eleven.
Can I use the text I found online?
Commonly saidAssumed, universally, with no rights statement on nine of the twelve pages that print it.
What we foundReprinting copyrighted text needs permission, and one site has been quietly correct about this all along.
Molière and Chekhov are free, so any version is free?
Commonly saidImplied everywhere, because nobody names a translator.
What we foundThe translation has its own ninety-five years. The play being old tells you nothing at all.
Which pieces are overdone?
Commonly saidLong blacklists circulate, sourced to nobody.
What we foundOne published request exists, from one American university, and it names writers rather than plays.
Do I have to be funny?
Commonly saidYes, and the room will laugh if you are.
What we foundThe teachers openly disagree. What they agree on is that nothing is funny without something at stake.
Is a free original monologue a safe choice?
Commonly saidRecommended widely, and given away by several of the biggest sites in the field.
What we foundBanned at Tisch, and named in the only published do-not list we could find. Excellent everywhere else.
So choose from a published play, cut it to ninety seconds, and name the translator before you record a word of it. Those three things put you inside every rule in both tables above, and they take an afternoon. Then spend the rest of your time on what the man wants and why he is certain he is being reasonable, because that is the only part of this a panel is actually watching.