New York-based comedian Pooja Reddy will premiere her country cabaret show, "Pooja Reddy Is White Trash," at Joe's Pub this month. The show turns her small-town Kentucky childhood — hunting, fishing, chewing tobacco and country radio — into material that dismantles stereotypes about who gets to claim a Southern identity.

Reddy grew up the daughter of a doctor in a Kentucky farming community that had none. Her South Indian immigrant parents settled there so her father could practice medicine. "It felt like I had a very normal, Southern upbringing just like any of my other classmates did," Reddy told NPR's Jewly Hight of Nashville Public Radio. "But at the end of the night, I was just going home, and I was eating pappu and annam and biryani and eating some South Indian food."

In her original song "Wish You Were Here," Reddy sums up the paradox of her youth: "Y'all, I had an amazing childhood. They would have written books about it, like Chicken Soup for the Indian Girl's Soul, who was the only brown person in her school, and her classmates would call her Pooha (ph) 'cause they thought she was Mexican." The song describes a place where she learned Southern politeness early — alongside chewing tobacco. Her family sometimes drove 90 miles to the nearest Hindu temple, while Reddy socialized with friends at their Christian congregations.

She says the tensions in her identity came from outside, not within. "I don't think I've ever been confused about my identity in terms of how Indian I am or how American I am," she said. "That's never been a conflict for me." The hang-ups belonged to others. When she left the South for an internship, people volunteered their low opinions of Kentuckians: "I've never met anyone from Kentucky. It's probably because they're not smart enough to leave. How could you be from there?" Reddy said those encounters shaped her mission. "I think experiences like that made me want to tell stories about what it means to be a person of color that has a strongly Southern identity."

Storytelling has long been her tool for bridging cultures. In one signature bit, she recalls begging her parents to let her attend a sleepaway camp run by the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife. "I'm convinced that the only reason they let me go is because it was called Camp Currie," she says in the archived recording, to laughter. "They're like, finally, our daughter is showing an interest in cooking."

Reddy's path to comedy ran through satirical writing to friends during an internship with the Obama administration. After relocating to New York, she committed to the craft — open mics, residencies, and eventually the workshop process that produced the Joe's Pub show.

At its center sits Reddy's playful reimagining of country music, a genre she says she never quite heard herself in. As a teenager on Kentucky lakes dotted with pontoon boats, she listened to Bro-country come-ons on the radio. "I would listen to the country songs, and the protagonists would be, you know, blonde hair, miniskirt," she said. "And I was like, well, that's not me. And so I would be writing myself into the music. Brown skin, mustache. Her mom doesn't let you text her."

That rewriting became "Mustache," a song she describes as blending the self-assuredness of the first country song she ever loved — Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman" — with the Bollywood number "Sheila Ki Jawani," performed by Sunidhi Chauhan and Vishal Dadlani. It speaks, she says, for her 15-year-old self rolling her eyes at white beauty standards: "I got a mustache. Gave the waxer panic attack. God, give me a man that can handle that."

Reddy's comedy argues that no population is monolithic — not cosmopolitan northerners, rural southerners, children of immigrants or country fans. "We're not all that different," she said. "And maybe if somebody who looks like they wouldn't be a typical southerner, maybe if it's coming from me, then you might actually buy it and believe it." Her run at Joe's Pub will test whether New York audiences buy it — and laugh along the way.