Cory Kahaney has found unexpected success in her third career, as a standup comic.

But for the Ardsley-reared, Manhattan-based woman, that success is bittersweet: Kahaney always seems to be the lone female on such programs as NBC’s “The Last Comic Standing,” where she earned notoriety as a grand finalist.

It seemed to her that there were an awful lot of fabulous female comics — generations of them, many of them Jewish — of which she considered herself only the latest in an illustrious line.

So Kahaney, who has had her own special on Comedy Central and appeared on “Politically Incorrect,” “The View,” “The Late Late Show” and in numerous comedy festivals, decided to create a vehicle for female Jewish comedians.

The result is “The JAP Show: Jewish American Princesses of Comedy,” a sharp, funny love letter to female Jewish comedians that is now playing at the Actors Temple Theater in Midtown Manhattan.

“I just thought it would be great to create something to empower women,” explained Kahaney. “And even at my hungriest times, I could always count on a Jewish booking, whether from Hadassah or a country club. I thought, ‘These are people who clearly like my act. Why not create something for them?’”

As for the show’s title — which may be the most off-putting element in what is largely a delightful show — the “Princess” part is partly a play on the “JAP” stereotype, partly a play on the trend toward “Kings of Comedy” specials.

“It’s sort of tongue in cheek,” Kahaney said. “But aren’t we the princesses?”

Kahaney originally conceived the show as a Jewish women’s comedy tour, but when she approached promoters, she was told she needed more of a story-based concept. So she researched Jewish comics going back to the 1940s, when standup originated. She finally selected her five favorite female comics — Belle Barth, Jean Carroll, Pearl Williams, Totie Fields and Betty Walker — and decided to build a show around them, piecing together vintage film, audio and multimedia clips, interlacing an homage to each comic matriarch with a hilarious set from one of today’s top comics.

“It’s historical, but we don’t want to take ourselves too seriously. This is not a PBS special,” Kahaney explained.

The show opens with four comics — a rotating cast that has included Kahaney, Cathy Ladman, Jackie Hoffman, Jessica Kirson, Sherry Davey, Julie Goldman and Betsy Salkind — trading quips about Jewish women, with jokes that veer from the familiar to the raunchy to the raunchily familiar. (Here’s a sample, paraphrased: “Why do Jewish women put on weight after marriage? The single girl looks in the refrigerator, doesn’t see anything she likes and goes to bed. The married woman looks in the bed, doesn’t see anything she likes and goes to the refrigerator.”)

Then each woman gets her own turn in the limelight, introducing one of the original “princesses of comedy” through vintage clips that appear in lighted screen bubbles over the stage before launching into her own round of jokes.

While many of the jokes are on Jewish themes, most of them touch on subject matter anyone can find funny: marriage, mothers, mothers-in-law, Weight Watchers, weddings and, of course, sex.

On a recent Saturday night, the first comic was Salkind, a young woman in a ‘50s-style shirtdress and red lipstick, and things did not look promising. Her slow pacing, soft delivery and well-worn humor — jokes about how Los Angelenos can’t drive in the rain, for instance — lost the audience until she brought out her signature trick at the end: a five-minute-long impersonation of a squirrel who nibbles through an entire sheet of matzah. It was fascinating, hilarious and repellent.

It was all uphill from there.

The next comic — a last-minute, Irish replacement named Maureen — kept the surprisingly diverse audience in stitches with her sharp, bitterly ironic commentary and on-the-outside-looking-in Irish-Jewish humor.

Julie Goldman, a self-described “butch lezz,” immediately disarmed the audience by frankly, and humorously, acknowledging what everyone was thinking: that with her button-down shirt and spiked Elvis do, she looked, well, like a man. Her set kept the audience cackling through the story of her “big lesbian wedding,” as she hilariously recounted how her mother — portrayed here as the amalgam of all pillar-of-the-synagogue Jewish matriarchs, with their perpetual disappointment in their children — unexpectedly embraced the idea. She really wanted to throw a big Jewish wedding, Jill explained. Besides, her brother burned down the house; now was that really worse than lesbianism?

Kahaney herself was the most broadly relatable and accessible of the comics. She has the qualities that set the best comics apart: great timing, subject matter that hits home and keeps the audience laughing, and a presence that is warm, familiar and disarming.

This reporter has never been a fan of standup comedy, but along with the rest of the sell-out audience, found herself laughing most of the way through the show. The intimate performance space of the Actors Temple Theater — housed in an actual, functioning synagogue that hashistorically catered to show business types — enhances the immediacy of the humor.

Kahaney’s own Jewish humor is rooted in her experience, both growing up in a culturally Jewish family and marrying into two more that took Jewish practice seriously.

“I became drawn to it, and then when I had a daughter, I felt it was sort of an obligation,” explained Kahaney, who has a 22-year-old daughter from her first marriage and a 2-year-old son with second husband, attorney Ken Misrok. At 18, after her parents moved to Los Angeles, Kahaney returned to New York to try her luck at an acting career.

“I tried to be an ingenue, but I never was one,” she admitted. “I did Shakespeare, Strindberg, Chekhov, all the classics, and it never clicked.”

The one constant was her job waiting tables. “I finally admitted to myself that what I really had was a restaurant career,” she said.

So Kahaney embraced fate, moving up from waiter to chef. But she found herself drawn back into the entertainment business through her colleagues, several of whom moonlighted in comedy. “I sat through lots of shows where I felt, ‘Gee, I could do this better myself,’ ” she recalled.

And just like that, she was back onstage. Except that as a comic, “it just felt so much more honest, and very freeing,” she said. “In acting, the doors weren’t opening, but in comedy, the doors were just flying open.”

Kahaney started landing big television gigs, and the rest is history. As she takes the stage at Actors Temple Theater, sharing the limelight with some of today’s hottest stars and saluting the very funny women who paved her way, she re-flects, “It has been a really great life.” WJC

“The JAP Show: Jewish American Princesses of Comedy” is playing at the Actors Temple Theater, 339 W. 47th St., between 8th and 9th Avenues, Manhattan. It can be seen Tuesdays to Thursdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Wednesdays at 3 p.m., and Sundays at 5 p.m. Tickets are $49.50 to $65.00, and can be purchased at the box office or through Telecharge by calling (212) 239-6200, or online at Telecharge.com. Group rates are available.