Annie Hall Monologues

Alvy Singer, a divorced Jewish comedian, reflects on his relationship with ex-lover Annie Hall, an aspiring nightclub singer, which ended abruptly just like his previous marriages.

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I… I realized what a terrific person she was, and… and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I… I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this… this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and… but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us… need the eggs.

Hey listen, gimme a kiss.

Yeah, why not, because we're just gonna go home later, right, and then there's gonna be all that tension, we've never kissed before and I'll never know when to make the right move or anything. So we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we'll go eat. We'll digest our food better.

That sex was the most fun I've ever had without laughing.

Love is too weak a word for what I feel - I luuurve you, you know, I loave you, I luff you, two F's, yes I have to invent, of course I - I do, don't you think I do?

There's an old joke - um… two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The… the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women.

Sun is bad for you. Everything our parents said was good is bad. Sun, milk, red meat… college.

I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.

Awards! They always give out awards! I can't believe it. Greatest Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.

Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.

Honey, there's a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick.

I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final, you know. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me. When I was thrown out, my mother, who was an emotionally high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles. I was depressed at that time. I was in analysis. I was suicidal as a matter of fact and would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian, and, if you kill yourself, they make you pay for the sessions you miss.

Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.

Annie, there's a big lobster behind the refrigerator. I can't get it out. This thing's heavy. Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.

You, you, you're like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, red diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself.

You know, I don't think I could take a mellow evening because I - I don't respond well to mellow. You know what I mean? I have a tendency to - if I get too mellow, I - I ripen and then rot, you know.

Oh my God, she's right. Why did I turn off Allison Portchnik? She was beautiful, she was willing. She was real intelligent. Is it the old Groucho Marx joke that I'm - I just don't want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member?

Well, how am I a para-? I pick up on those kind of things. You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, uh, "Did you eat yet or what?" and Tom Christie said, "No, didjew?" Not, "did you", "didjew eat?" Jew? No, not "did you eat", but "Jew eat"? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?

I - I don't know why they would have me at this kind of rally 'cause, excuse me, I'm not essentially a political comedian at all. I interestingly had, uh, dated a woman in the Eisenhower Administration, briefly, and, uh, it was ironic to me 'cause, uh, 'cause I was trying to - do to her what Eisenhower has been doing to the country for the last eight years.

Lately the strangest things have been going through my mind, 'cause I turned forty, and I guess I'm going through a life crisis or something, I don't know. I - and I'm not worried about aging. I'm not one of those characters, you know. Although I'm balding slightly on top, that's about the worst you can say about me. I, uh, I think I'm gonna get better as I get older, you know? I think I'm gonna be the - the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say the, uh, distinguished gray, for instance, you know? Unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.

Annie and I broke up and I - I still can't get my mind around that. You know, I - I keep sifting the pieces of the relationship through my mind and - and examining my life and tryin' to figure out where did the screw-up come, you know, and a year ago we were in love.

Probably on their first date, right? Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. "Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce, and sodomy."

It's always some kind of an excuse. You know, you used to think that I was very sexy. What - when we first started going out, we had sex constantly. We're - we're probably listed in the "Guinness Book of World Records".

I can't believe this family. Annie's mother is so beautiful, and they're talking about swap meets and boat basins, and that old lady at the end of the table is a classic Jew-hater.