"I have no idea what I'm going to say to you tonight. No idea."

Mike Daisey '96 leans against a podium in the back room of the Galapagos Art Space, a converted mayonnaise factory in trendy Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that is home to regular readings and performances. The audience and performers are gathered on this Wednesday in November for an evening of tragicomic storytelling (an offshoot of Dave Eggers's popular literary journal, McSweeney's), based on the theme, "How to Win a Fight."

Daisey, the first performer, is newly transplanted to Brooklyn from Seattle, where his wildly successful one-man show, "21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com," earned him the laurel "First Internet Dot.Comic." Finishing his drink, he bangs the empty glass on the lectern and addresses the assembled audience. "I'm from northern, northern Maine. If you've ever been to Maine, you've never been to where I'm from."

Fort Kent, Maine, couldn't be farther away from the urban literary milieu Daisey currently calls home, but how he made it from there to here--with his one-man show due to appear in London's West End theater district this winter, then off-Broadway in the spring, and a six-figure book deal from Simon & Schuster in his back pocket--is only part of the story. The rest has to do with the mystery of how this thoughtful, serious-minded person arrived at a reputation as a comic.

After all, Daisey's college years, though sometimes madcap, were hardly slapstick. He spent them fashioning his own major, "Aesthetics," for which he wrote a lot of Carver-esque stories and poetry and acted in seemingly countless Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett plays. Perhaps even more vexing, however, is the question of how his newfound success (founded, mind you, not only in comedy but also in the dot-com bubble) will play here in this post-9/11 cultural climate. The answers, oddly enough, might have little to do with comedy itself and everything to do with storytelling.

Daisey's story begins in the town of Fort Kent, 200 miles north of Augusta. The town is off the radar of most Mainers and tourists alike, and with a population of about 2,000 there's not a whole lot going on. Now imagine a younger version of the present-day Mike Daisey living in this small town like some sort of misplaced exchange student.

"He was a miniature Charlie Brown," said Beth Paradis (pronounced "parody"), a neighbor of the Daisey family who remembers Mike Daisey as a 9-year-old. "He looked like him, acted like him and, I'm afraid to say, was treated like him."

Young Mike Daisey was "a real individual," she said. "He may have been young, but already he followed a different drummer, and he didn't mind one bit. He was such a nice boy, and so comfortable with who he was, even though he was picked on."

Sum him up in a word? "Eccentric," Paradis said.