While telling stories is about as old as life itself, storytelling, as a subgenre of comedy and increasingly theater, is relatively new, growing rapidly over the past decade. It now has its own stars, classes, open-mike nights and even its first national scandal. Mike Daisey’s notorious multinarrative polemic “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” is something of an anomaly. Most storytellers offer modest tales of 5 to 10 minutes that pivot on a personal moment. The Moth, which produces shows in cities across the country, remains the most popular showcase, but a dizzying number of quirky, diverse small-scale alternatives have emerged throughout New York.

The soft-spoken Seth Lind hosts a charming monthly show in the East Village called Told. Kevin Allison, a veteran of the MTV series “The State,” leads a more rambunctious one, Risk! at the Pit, while at Union Hall in Brooklyn, the imposing Jeff Simmermon runs And I Am Not Lying, mixing burlesque with first-person tales. Like in stand-up, a small, diverse group of seasoned artists regularly perform in these showcases.

Some, like Todd Bieber, employ multimedia, as in his account of making spectacularly lame low-budget TV commercials in his hometown in “Commercial Interruption.” Cyndi Freeman elegantly mixes confession with impressions and burlesque to create an Andy Kaufman-like stunt.

But storytelling’s bread and butter is dramatic heartache and romantic misadventure. In a hypnotically slow delivery Dave Hill, wearing plaid pants at Sideshow Goshko, a well-programmed night at the 92Y Tribeca, began a story about meeting a girl of his dreams with typical self-deprecation: “I was spending a quiet night at home, me and the Internet.”

No one expresses romantic yearning with as much gusto as Adam Wade, a prolific performer from Hoboken, N.J., whose tales have the bittersweet tone of a Kenneth Lonergan play. Rubbing the back of his neck bashfully he describes working miserable jobs or spending a night hanging out in empty hotel rooms in bursts of sentences that seem so impatient to get out that he often jumps ahead to the next one before getting to the period. Mr. Wade occasionally gets angry — the rage of the nerd is a major theme of storytelling — but his characteristic moment is when a minor episode inspires an exhilarating if doomed sense of joy. It’s usually because of a girl fated not to be the one.