You know John Hefner, even if you don’t know him. He’s a total geek — a costume-dressing, trivia-spouting, shows-Ravenous-to-all-his-first-dates geek.

I mean that in a friendly, even admiring way. He seems to be under the impression that his geekdom is an out-of-control malady that exacerbates his dating woes, but really now. We live in the Age of Geeks. The jock-jerk in the White House is as despised as any U.S. president has ever been. Those people lining up to buy iPhones over the weekend? Not being mocked for that. (At least, not nearly enough). Iron Man will remain the most popular movie of the year only for a few more days, until The Dark Knight comes out. Radiohead? Geeks. Kanye West? Please -- have you heard about his show? Rappers who claim to be pimps and gangsters are now soundly outsold by rappers who claim to be aliens. Now more than ever, geeks reign supreme.

And, you know, it's about time: Geekdom is nothing more than knowledge of a subject, enthusiastically compiled and evangelically shared. Could be anything! Verily, Hefner is -- as he declares to us perhaps a few too many times -- a comic book geek, and a music geek, and a theater geek. But what makes his show work is that he’s a big-time storytelling geek, using the tools of misdirection and escalating tension to imbue his yarns about misfiring gay-dar and crushes on his personal trainer with genuine surprise and pleasure.

Monologuist John Hefner longs for a girl with eyes as bright as Green Lantern's power ring. So say we all, Dude. So say we all.

The telling counts for more than the tale, and while Hefner's autobiographical material feels familiar from Chasing Amy (a movie Kevin Smith made when he was 26, only a year older than Hefner is now), Hefner is skilled enough a raconteur to sustain interest.

His stated existential quandry (or at least, the tag line of the show) is "How to create a name for [himself] when someone already has?" Our John is "an estranged member of the Hefner dynasty," which I take to mean that he's never been invited to the Playboy Mansion.

But he's got a more immediate problem: How to find a woman who will dress up as Typhoid Mary (the fishnets-wearing schizophrenic assassin from the comic Daredevil, as if you didn't know) and accompany him for Halloween in his guise as the Batman villian Two-Face, thus creating "the world's first two-person foursome!" (Surely, this is an area where Uncle Hef -- or cousin Hef, or whatever he is -- could be of service.)

Typhoid Mary, the schizophrenic assassin from the comic Daredevil who fires Hefner's geeky lust. Obviously.

Like a lot of guys in this line, Hefner wrestles with his tendency to create problems for himself so his stories will have enough conflict to hold us rapt. When he observes that when in the sphere of a potential new companion he can now "almost see the stories coming," he introduces a theme that isn't quite as developed here as it could be, but one he will surely continue to examine in future outings.

Still, Hefner shows genuine promise. His tales of his own slow-dawning enlightenment, one embarrassing encounter at a time, recall those of the great Henry Rollins. (Rollins, of course, was touring the world with a band is his 20s, which gave him some richer material to which to apply the same set of narrative tools Hefner is using.)

Hefner has some of the physicality of one Homer Simpson; specifically the fey hand-spasms and tip-toe dances that express delight and anticipation. They are, one hopes, deliberate, but the smile that Hefner flashes his audience at the end of a story, when we've laughed and he knows he's brought the tale in for successful landing, feels spontaneous and genuine. Let's hope he doesn't lose it as his experience and his skill continue to grow.

John Hefner will perform The Hefner Monologues: How Hefnerian at DCAC Saturday, July 19 at 3 p.m., Sunday, July 20 at 7 p.m., and Thursday, July 24 at 8:30 p.m. The show runs 75 minutes.