The last we heard from Alex Edelman, the Jewish comedian had won a Tony and an Emmy for “Just for Us,” his account of attending a meeting of neo-Nazis in Queens. There are several  echoes of that adventure in “Alex Edelman: What Are You Going to Do,” his new show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 

There is the time, for example, he took a private tour of  Graceland, and Dee Dee the tour guide said “Did y’all know Elvis had Jewish blood?”
“Like in a vial around his neck?”
“Elvis’s great-great-grandmother Nancy Birdie was a member of the Jewish faith,”  Dee Dee elaborated.
“Dee Dee, if what you just told me was true. Elvis is as Jewish as I am.”
In the back-and-forth that follows, Dee Dee winds up screaming.

But such stories do not dominate Edelman’s hour at the Fringe.  It’s as if he wants to break free from his recent success, which has had its downsides.  “I’ve become to some people a representative Jew, which would have horrified the rabbis that educated me growing up. They’d be like, ‘That’s your Jew?! He’s the worst one.’ Now, after shows, instead of standard comedian audience fare, sometimes I get people who want to tell me about their personal experiences with antisemitism; I can always tell when it’s about to happen because their faces lack the patina of compliment.”  For 17 years, he tells us, he was just a “silly clown.” Now his joking is  expected to have deeper meaning. He doesn’t seem sure he wants the responsibility.

So now he tells stories about his father, an esteemed cardiologist, and about his own collection of seashells; he recounts an endless conversation he had on an airplane with a man who apparently mistook Neil deGrasse Tyson with Mike Tyson. He shares some of his personal challenges, talking about how he was tested frequently as a child for autism, about his difficulty getting a good night’s sleep, about his sessions with a therapist. He recounts his “Kumano Kodo” pilgrimage hike through Japan. He manages somehow to make all of this funny. His jokes about Christianity and about the Israel-Palestine conflict may shock people.

But he also tells stories from his first job in comedy. Yes, he was a clown — in a hospital in Jerusalem,  the ALYN Hospital, a rehab facility for children, many of whose patients, he tells us, are amputees. And he talks about the group he’s part of in New York, made up of Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, and the horrible ways some have been personally affected by the war. And he talks about the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world) and how it dictates that “you are not obligated to complete the work, but nor are you free to abandon it.”  Whether he likes it or not,  Alex Edelman doesn’t just make you laugh.