Not long ago, the comedian Mike Birbiglia was on an airplane eating a chicken-salad sandwich on walnut-raisin bread, when a flight attendant informed him that a woman sitting nearby had a nut allergy. “Well, I won’t feed them to her or, like, rub them on her face,” Birbiglia replied. But the attendant insisted: “She’ll have a reaction if there are nuts in the air.” The comedian finished his sandwich in the bathroom.

Birbiglia tells this story in his new comic monologue, “Thank God for Jokes” (in previews at the Lynn Redgrave Theatre, opening Feb. 11), in which he weighs the ever-present dangers of going too far with humor. “At the Redgrave, for example, a hundred and ninety-seven people will go, ‘Ha-ha, nuts in the air!’ ” he said recently, over a hot chocolate in Carroll Gardens. “And then three of them secretly will be, like, ‘That’s my life.’ ” Birbiglia is an unlikely guide through the minefield of offensive humor; in his previous solo shows, “Sleepwalk with Me” and “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend,” he honed the persona of a befuddled, conflict-averse beta male. But he’s not as mild-mannered as he appears. In “Orange Is the New Black,” his portrayal of a chummy middle-management type from a prison conglomerate became a queasy study of the banality of evil. (He based his performance on George W. Bush.) In “Thank God for Jokes,” he recounts the kerfuffle that ensued when he hosted the 2012 Gotham Awards and roasted David O. Russell, who was one of the honorees. Still, he’s no Ricky Gervais-style provocateur. “My goal is to take the audience as far as they will possibly go and still be on my side,” he explained.

Ultimately, he went on, “we all have the right to tell jokes, and we all have the right to be offended by jokes, and those two ideas can peacefully co-exist.” When he toured “Thank God for Jokes” in San Francisco, a kid with a lethal nut allergy asked him to autograph his EpiPen. Birbiglia asked the boy’s mother if she’d ever had to inject him. “She said, ‘Three times.’ And I said, ‘Wow, this kid almost died three times so I could tell that joke.’ ” ♦