by dan pine
staff writer
Susie Essman, who plays acid-tongued Susie Greene on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” admits fans sometimes appear let down when they meet her on the street.
“They’ll tell me they love the show,” she says. “I’m always quite gracious, and then they’re visibly disappointed I’m not yelling and screaming. People beg me to curse at them.”
Sometimes, to satisfy her adoring public, Essman will take a cell phone from a female fan whose husband is on the line. Then Essman will call the woman’s husband a … well, we can’t say it, even with asterisks.
“Curb” fans know Essman’s signature epithet, reserved for her TV husband, Jeff Greene (played by the generously girthed Jeff Garlin). It’s now part of the Jewish American comic lexicon, alongside famous Seinfeld-isms, which also trace their roots to “Curb” creator Larry David, like “No soup for you” and “sponge-worthy.”
Although Essman doesn’t have as much time to indulge her stand-up roots as she would like, she will visit the Bay Area this month for performances at Cobb’s Comedy Club. It’s her first San Francisco appearance.
But, she warns, her act is not family friendly. “Do not bring the children,” she said. “I can get totally wild and loose and raw. One of the great things about being on TV is you draw an audience. It gives me a lot of freedom. I don’t have to explain myself.”
It’s one of the odd things about TV: characters like Essman’s Susie Green or Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold from “Entourage,” who would prove detestable in real life, become loveable on TV. How does Essman explain the popularity of her raging bull of a character?
“What makes people like her is her complete and total comfort with her anger,” Essman theorizes. “She’s so comfortable in her skin. The New York Times says married women who do not express their anger are four times as likely to die. I thought, ‘Hey, I am putting something good in the world.’”
She also says that, in real life, the “Curb” set is a love fest. “Larry David and I are very close,” she says. “People ask [Garlin] if he gets upset with me when [the character] Susie makes fun of him. He says, ‘No, she’s just acting.’ He’s one of my closest friends.”
Calling one’s TV husband every foul name in the book may not sound like tikkun olam, but Essman is cool with it. And she’s even happier to be a link in the chain of Jewish comedy.
“The history of comedy is the history of Jews in this country, at least for the last 60 years,” says Essman, who lives in New York. “All the early TV humor was Jews, from ‘Bilko’ to Milton Berle. It shaped our society.”
Essman was shaped in a Jewish home in the Bronx and Mount Vernon, N.Y. She says everyone in her family was funny (“or thought they were”). Her parents were intellectuals who read Mark Twain and Sholem Aleichem stories to their kids at bedtime.
As for influences, Essman cites a classic from the golden age of comedy LP’s.
“When I was 5, I would listen to ‘The 2,000-Year-Old Man’ over and over again,” she recalls. “I would laugh, but I wouldn’t get the jokes. There was just something in the timing and the rhythm of it I got.”
Later, she mustered the nerve to take the stage of a Manhattan comedy club on open mic night. That sealed the deal. In the 1980s and ’90s she became a popular stand-up comic, and eventually received an invite to join the Friar’s Club, the Valhalla of comedians, Jewish and otherwise (but mostly Jewish).
In addition to “Curb,” Essman has done animation voice work, most notably co-starring with John Travolta in the Disney film “Bolt,” due out in 2008, in which she plays a sassy stray cat from New York.
And as for the “no kids” caveat for her act, Essman says in her normal life, she’s no Susie Greene. She happily plays the role of supportive stepmom to her boyfriend’s daughters. She’s even introduced them –– non-Jews all –– to Jewish culture.
“The girls talk Yiddish all the time,” she says proudly. “They’re these half-Chinese, exotic beauties who say words like ‘mishegas’ and ‘rachmones.’”
Susie Essman will appear at 8 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. Nov. 15-18, at Cobb’s Comedy Club, 915 Columbus Ave., S.F. Tickets: $20-$25. Information: (415) 928-4320 or online at www.cobbscomedyclub.com.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California