TALK about bad timing. Broadway’s “The Full Monty” – music and lyrics by David Yazbek – seemed set to take multiple Tonys until “The Producers” came along. A couple of years later, Yazbek’s “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” was riding high . . . then “Spamalot” galloped up.

It’s enough to drive a person crazy – unless, like Yazbek, you’re not set on being the next Stephen Sondheim.

“Musicals are lucrative and fun, if you get them right,” he says. “Sondheim was clearly born to write musicals. I was born to write music, and these albums are what I have to do.”

The latest of those albums – which the 47-year-old records with His Warmest Regards (yes, that’s the name of his band) – will get an airing tomorrow night at the Allen Room, part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series.

Titled “Evil Monkey Man” – named, it seems, not for any particular song, but for a drawing his 11-year-old son made – it’s full of pop-rock hooks and quirky, occasionally harrowing lyrics.

Look no further than “Monkey Baby Hanging on Chicken Wire,” inspired by the ghastly experiments on Capuchin monkeys in the ’50s.

If it’s not quite the stuff he wrote for the Letterman show years ago, so much the better.

“That was a really good first job after college,” says the Brown University grad, “and it was fun for a couple of months. My partner quit before I did, and then it was no fun.”

Winning an Emmy helped dull the pain, he says, and writing scripts – and the occasional Broadway show – kept him solvent when record sales didn’t.

Come Saturday, expect to meet a couple of his friends: wacky chanteuse Nellie McKay and opera’s Lauren Flanigan, who’ll sing some of his Broadway stuff.

“We’re all guys for the album, so there’s a lot of testosterone lumbering around the stage,” he explains. “Their voices will give us a whole other timbre.”

Call it The Full Yazbek.