Comedian Mike Birbiglia returns to the scene of the crime

Mike Birbiglia was a sophomore at Georgetown University when he won a “Funniest Man on Campus” contest in his first-ever appearance on any stage. He told jokes on “Letterman” when he was 24. He got his first Comedy Central special when he was 25.

But it wasn’t until he leapt through the second-story window of a motel in Walla Walla, Wash., that he got his big br — er, that his career entered a significant new phase.

Now 31, Birbiglia wasn’t permanently injured in the fall. But he was diagnosed with rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, an ailment he manifested through very athletic sleepwalking. He now sleeps in a sleeping bag, under sedation, to reduce the risk that he’ll injure himself or his wife. His nocturnal misadventure became the foundation of “Sleepwalk With Me,” a one-man show that played New York’s Bleecker Street Theatre for 198 performances before closing in June.

The monologue, which Birbiglia is adapting both as a nonfiction book and as a feature film, has earned him notice not merely as a comic, but as an uncommonly fearless and disarming raconteur. The popular public radio story anthology “This American Life” built an August 2008 episode titled “Fear of Sleep” around Birbiglia’s tale of his moonlit walkabout, and it brought him on as a semi-regular contributor.

At a “This American Life” live broadcast in April, he told a story about his involvement in a car accident that he expects to figure prominently in his still-percolating next one-man show. He’ll road-test that and other material under consideration when he plays the Warner Theatre on Saturday night.

For a guy who a decade ago was avoiding his physician father’s questions about college and working the door and busing tables at the D.C. Improv — where he studied and opened for comics like Brian Reagan, Katherine Madigan and Jake Johannsen, and later recorded his stand-up album “Two Drink Mike” — headlining the storied 85-year-old Warner will likely seem a posh homecoming. As is his practice when performing in D.C., he plans to make time to speak to current students of his dramatic writing professor at Georgetown, John H. Glavin.

But as ever, his eyes are focused firmly on the future. He wants to appear in films that he’ll write and direct himself, like Woody Allen, who started out in stand-up, too.

“Woody Allen says this in a lot of interviews,” Birbiglia says from his New York apartment, as if attempting to outsource his own. “I want to get to a point where I’m using comedy to tell a story. I want it to be so funny the audience doesn’t even realize there’s a larger story there.”