NEW YORK – It’s about 10:15 on Wednesday night and there are four of us sitting together at Nadine’s – a small, refined restaurant situated on a street corner in midtown Manhattan.

We’re waiting for Dave Gorman, who is cleaning up after making his audience at the Westbeth Theatre Center laugh for more than an hour and a half – something he’s been doing since Oct. 4, when the 30-year-old bloke from England first brought his ongoing anecdote to the American public.

“It’s a true story,” said Gorman, now sitting comfortably with a glass of Pinot Grigio wine. “And I can only work with the facts I’ve got, so you can decide for yourself, whether the story’s that good, or I’m that good a storyteller.

“It doesn’t matter which is which.”

And he’s correct. When you’re sitting with Dave Gorman, stuffing your face with some of New York’s finest cuisine, you learn quickly not to squander your bites. It’s genuinely difficult to finish your plate when you have a storyteller of such brilliance sitting on the other side of the table, disseminating honest tales of such astonishing absurdity.

“I had a very odd day in London a while ago,” Gorman began, as he readied to unleash another of his many stories in his typical British accent.

“I was in a club and this woman came up to me and said, ‘It’s your fault!’

“What is?

“She said, ‘my son has named his bike Dave Gorman. It’s your fault…’

“Then I walked into the street and this very, very drunk guy from Newcastle came up to me and was just like hugging me and said, ‘I’m just about to go and sleep with a prostitute. And I’m going to dedicate it to you.’

“So within the space of ten minutes, I have an 11-year old boy naming his bike Dave Gorman, and like a 26-year-old drunk dedicating…just an awful thing. Just how extreme can that be?”

Printed words don’t do his delivery justice, of course, but the wonderful eccentricity of his language and personal deliberation surely emerges when you see him in action.

His story is quite simple. He has an obsession with meeting other people named Dave Gorman and documenting those encounters. It’s kind of like collecting coins, or stamps, or baseball cards. Except he’s turned it all into a book, a BBC television series and now an Off Broadway show.

And when he’s on stage delivering his monologue, Gorman takes his audience along for one crazy adventure. Accompanied by an overhead projector (which he uses to show us his boarding passes) and a slide show reel (mostly of him shaking hands with other Dave Gorman’s) he has a hilarious fixation with almost making you feel bad that you’re not a Dave Gorman – and Wednesday, when the people gathered in the Westbeth found out they were indeed Dave Gorman-less, he reminded them how weird it must feel to actually be disappointed that a Dave Gorman did not exist among them – because they were.

And it’s his fault for making it seem so damn cool to carry his name.

I am not Dave Gorman. Are you?