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.