If you’d been tried and convicted, acquitted, convicted again then re-acquitted for the murder of your friend, would you make a joke of it?

Neither, it seems, would Amanda Knox, the comely American who spent four years in prison, before her acquittal, for the brutal murder in 2007 of Meredith Kercher, a young British woman with whom she shared a flat when they were exchange students in Italy.

Rudy Guede, an Ivorian immigrant, was convicted of the murder.

Yet Amanda is performing a standup comedy show for 11 days at the Edinburgh Festival, and it will indeed address the issue of Meredith Kercher’s murder – if it weren’t, she says, it would be the elephant in the room.

Certainly the murder, and her subsequent trials, are the sole reason why most of us have ever heard of her. The non-joke extends to the title of the show, Cartwheel; that refers to the story that she turned a cartwheel when first accused of Meredith’s murder – incorrect, she says…she actually did the splits.

But she says for the avoidance of any doubt: “I don’t joke about Meredith’s death. I joke a lot about how I was vilified, but I don’t joke about her murder. That’s just a line for me. I set red lines for myself that other comedians don’t.”

Heroic restraint, then. But there are people out there, myself included, who take a dim view of her doing “comedy” at all in relation to her tribulations even if she doesn’t treat the murder of her dead friend as inherently humorous.

Standup is often transgressive, but few comedians use material derived from the events that followed a young girl’s gruesome killing. Knox cannot avoid discussing Kercher’s murder if she’s to do standup at all. So why not give this particular career path a miss?

Meredith’s still-grieving family is horrified. Her sister Stephanie says: “Our family’s pain is immense. I can’t explain to you how much pain our family have been through, and also we’re talking two decades later now, this pain.” To Knox, she said: “Think about the family here, think about her friends and to turn the tables if it was your sister that this had happened to, because I know you have a sister as well.”

That, however, would involve a degree of self-abnegation that the host of the podcast series Hard Knox is probably incapable of. Not doing the show, forgoing her comedy career, would entail suppressing her aspirations, and she’s not having that. She regrets that Meredith’s family has never spoken to her.

“I assume they still assume that I’m guilty”, she told the Telegraph. “I would very much want to establish that kind of communication, but I’m not going to have my life dictated by what they want for me.”

She added that: “I have the life that I have lived, and I have the right to tell my own story, and Meredith is a big part of that story. And I think I honour her.”

But even if she has the right to tell her story, she doesn’t have to tell it, knowing the distress it causes the Kerchers.

A different woman might reflect that she has the good fortune to live, to have children, which poor Meredith never did.

Amanda Knox shouldn’t be doing this show. She says Meredith would have found it funny. Maybe, maybe not. For her family, however, it’s reviving a pain that will never leave them, and that’s not funny at all.