And for his next trick, monologuist Josh Lefkowitz will riff for 85 minutes on how hard it is to be a 26-year-old artist struggling to write a follow-up to his celebrated show from the 2006 Capital Fringe Festival, lest he be forced to, well, get a job. Also, he loves his girlfriend, but once he became a success — Heaven forfend! — other attractive women started hitting on him.

Yep, it sure sounds like the longest 85 minutes of your life.

It’s not. Actually, the show is over in a veritable blink. He’s really got it, this fey David Byrne look-alike, and by “it” we mean a relaxed and commanding stage presence, an insightful comedic sensibility that’s just different enough from those of the late Spalding Gray or the great Henry Rollins to keep us awake, and a sincere appreciation for just how insanely lucky he is to talk about himself for a living.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Like all great autobiographers and raconteurs, Lefkowitz seems just a little more sentient than most of us. So when he talks about walking into a bookstore and feeling taunted by the likes of William Faulkner, Herman Melville, and James Baldwin, it’s actually funny rather than self-aggrandizing. Lefkowitz’s simultaneous fear of running out of things to say and his urgent desire for a break from the metronome of real-time autobiography (“it’s like you’re not really living your life”) will feel distinctly familiar to anyone with a creative molecule in them. And who doesn’t secretly or not-so-secretly suspect that theirs is a story worth telling?

Yakety yakety yak: Josh Lefkowitz tries to figure it all out in Now What?