His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley (Jake Broder) whispers into a microphone in the dark. The pitch-black room focuses the ear on his raspy voice. “Just want to tuck in here under the radar, m’lords, m’ladies,” he breathes. The room feels close; you are in the dark with strangers. Lord Buckley, in his vaguely fake English accent, is improvising a story. He zigzags through it like a jazzman, driving hard through a riff, then backing off, playing hot, then sweet. He speaks in a groovy bebop language all his own and does his own sound effects. There are no big punch lines – just the thrill of the ride. Buckley’s quick, crazy intelligence careens into corners of the mind that are rarely traveled. “It is good now and then,” he intones, “To commune with your subconscious mind and ask yourself, just who in the hell do you think you are?”

So begins the subversive,mind-bending, and deeply affecting journey of “His Royal Hipness Lord Buckley in the Zam Zam Room,” now playing a limited cabaret engagement at the 59E59 Theater. Mr. Broder’s one-man tour de force made a splash in London last year, resurrecting mainstream interest in the recordings of the 1950s cult performer Lord Buckley, a former California lumberjack whose beatsahib persona influenced everyone from Bob Dylan to Lenny Bruce to Richard Pryor.

The show’s format is simple: two sets of very good jazz (thanks to Paul “V.P” Owen, Brad Russell, and Jimmy Young) and rapid-fire spoken riffs, culled primarily from the Buckley archives. Its effect is complex. On stage is an authentic re-creation of an outrageous, irreverent, and whip-smart 1950s underground act. But Lord Buckley’s original audience – those groovy chicks and cool cats in love with jazz and infuriated by 1950s complacency – is long gone. That crowd worshipped; this one watches.

Still, watching Mr. Broder’s extraordinary performance as Lord Buckley, it’s hard to imagine that audiences ever kept up with His Royal Hipness. The act’s mainstay – Buckley’s retelling of fables in his own invented “hipsemantic” vernacular – demands as much active listening as any passage in Shakespeare. (In the “hipsemantic,” the Gettysburg Address begins, “Four big hits and seven licks ago, our beforedaddies swung forth upon this sweet groovy land … “) The gentleman’s lightning-quick free association (which leaves most listeners in the dust) recalls Robin Williams, another Lord Buckley admirer. Most comics thrive on being understood; on getting the belly laugh on cue.You get the feeling that Lord Buckley preferred the delayed smile of recognition.

Lord Buckley’s material, Mr. Broder’s delivery, and Phillip Breen’s direction quickly lay down an unfamiliar – but mesmerizing – rhythm. There’s no urgency about getting laughs. This is not stand-up, although at moments, when Mr. Broder stands sweating at the microphone and staring into the house, he has some of stand-up’s feverish intensity. Extended riffs on themes like the Pied Piper, Jesus of Nazareth (“The Nazz”), Gandhi (“The Hip Ghan”), and Jonah and the Whale are punctuated by music cues, hand gestures, and cartoonish noises. A story may dissolve into a jazz standard, with Buckley snapping his fingers and smiling at the piano player. Or the next song may be a vicious satire on Southern racism – to which laughter seems a crude response. Lord Buckley presides over it all with faux British reserve, never displaying the comic’s eagerness to be liked.

Mr. Broder’s show also dares to present Lord Buckley without biography. Entering the Zam Zam Room is as context-free as entering a nightclub to hear a new comic.The troubling details of Lord Buckley’s real life (six marriages, ties to Al Capone) are reduced to a few reefer jokes, though some of the man’s contradictions seep through the material. For all his earnest attacks on racism, Lord Buckley thinks nothing of putting on a Mammy accent to play a black character. Mr. Broder’s script lets the audience decide what to think of Lord Buckley. All he does is reanimate him – stunningly.

Mr. Broder, who played the title role in Peter Hall’s “Amadeus,” has chosen a formidable role to play. Other than a few fun bits with sidekick David Tughan and the occasional jazz jam, Mr. Broder shoulders the entire show. Countless stylings pass through the transom of Buckley’s quick mind and out of his posh mouth – vaudeville, bebop, gospel.When he tells stories, Lord Buckley pops in and out of his characters’ voices. Mr. Broder handles all this with aplomb, but when he comes home to roost in Buckley’s narrator voice, it is always a gentle one – wearied by the horrors of the world but touched by its pleasures and its people. This is a satirist who can speak of love without quotation marks.

Mr. Broder can juke and jive at the requisite breakneck speeds. He can scat-sing, play sax, smoke – and still have enough lung capacity to manipulate his voice with exquisite control. In the midst of all this delirium he manages to locate the emotional core of Lord Buckley: the lover of poetic description, the reckless subversive, the lost boy. At the end of each story, Mr. Broder’s voice slows down. His eyes search the crowd, and his voice finds a note somehow the more poignant for its restricted vocabulary. “And that’s the story of Scrooge,” he says gently. “You can get with it if you want to.”

Until December 31 (59 E. 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, 212-279-4200).