Meet Susie Essman, the cussin curmudgeon of Curb Your Enthusiasm

There aren’t many actresses who are presented with their fans’ smartphones in the supermarket and asked to say to the person on the other line, “You fat f–k!”

Meet Susie Essman.

As Susie Greene on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Essman, 62, has made her penchant for profanity into a kind of potty-mouthed poetry, cursing with such fluent abandon that she makes Hollywood’s tough guys sound like schoolyard showoffs.

“It’s the oddest thing,” says Essman. “I make people happy by telling them to ‘go f -- k themselves.’ Who plans your life? When I was a little girl, what do you want to be when you grow up? I want to be somebody who curses at people. And then they pay me money and I make them happy. Who would have thought of that?”

Essman and “Curb” creator/star Larry David started out together as standup comedians in the mid-1980s at Catch a Rising Star in Manhattan. “It was an amazing time,” says Essman, who was born in The Bronx and grew up in Mount Vernon. “People were lined up around the block at the Improv and Catch a Rising Star and the Comic Strip and you knew everybody.”

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She and David lost touch for about 10 years after he moved to LA. “Then he saw me on a roast of Jerry Stiller,” she says. “And you know roasts. You’re filthy, because you have to be. Then it was ding! ding! ding! Susie’s the perfect person to play this part.”

Susie stands apart from all the characters on the show who are tongue-tied by Larry’s insults because she scares him to death. “He lives in fear of me,” Essman says.

She was not surprised at all that David decided to round up the “Curb” gang, which includes Richard Lewis, Cheryl Hines and Ted Danson, for Season 9 [the series last aired in 2011]. “I knew we were going to come back because I know how much [Larry] loves shooting ‘Curb,’” she says. “We have so much fun. This isn’t ‘Baywatch,’ where I can’t show up in a bikini anymore. We were old six years ago. We’re older now.”

David and Essman picked up where they left off. “We’ve had this dialogue of the unconscious going where I kind of got what he wanted,” she says. “He got what I was doing and created more scenarios for that. And it just kind of evolved.”

So is Larry really that cranky? “He thinks all those things. It’s his id. But real Larry as opposed to show Larry knows better than to actually say those things,” Essman says. She compares his TV persona to a ventriloquist’s puppet. “He’s the one that’s saying all the lines that Larry really wants to say. But that’s the fun of it. You don’t want to play yourself. You’re with yourself all day long.”

During the six years that “Curb” was on hiatus, Essman did some stand-up as well as recurring roles on series such as “Broad City” and “Law & Order: SVU.” “Right now, I feel kind of quiet,” she says. “I’m doing a lot of corporate things, private dates.

“There’s something great about having this skill to make people laugh,” she says. “It’s a good thing [that] you’re putting out into the world.”

Warning: Graphic language

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