Susie Essman in Vegas, You’ll Find Her Indoors

Susie Essman is one of the quickest minds in comedy.  She has become best known for playing the outspoken Susie Green on the HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and she’s also been a mainstay on the stand up scene for over two decades.  Like her alter-ego Susie Green, she is smart, very street, and unflinchingly honest.  So we were very excited to get to talk comedy with her.  

Susie Essman is headlining Vegas this weekend as part of the remarkable “Lipshtick” lineup at the Venetian Hotel and Casino. But when she’s not on stage, you won’t find her outdoors soaking up the sun. “You’ll find me indoors” she said, remarking about the weather being possibly 115 degrees this weekend. “It’s hot there this time of year, and it’s that dry heat where your just like [gaaaaaaaaaaaasp]…but I do find when I’m in Vegas, I don’t go outside. You’re in like a hermetically sealed environment. You’re in the Venetian and the palazzo, so I will never leave that complex.”

Aside from the heat, Essman said she loves performing in Vegas. “I like the audiences in Vegas, I always have great audiences. And this room at the Venetian is a great comedy room. I can’t explain how much of a difference that makes when you’re working in a great comedy room, as opposed to some other kind of venue.”

What counts as a bad room? Essman remembered what it was like to work at the Concord Hotel in the famed Borscht Belt in the Catskills of New York. That, she said, was the worst room ever. “It was giant, it was all spread out and I remember instead of applauding they would knock on the table so you couldn’t even hear the applause. And they used to say there was a “one exit”, a “two exit” or a “three exit” show. That’s how they judged the act. Not whether people were laughing, but whether they left.” The audiences, Essman said, would talk to each other, and talk loud. “The whole weekend would be about how much food you could consume because it was free– it was not free, it was inclusive,” she recalled. “I remember the back stage of the Concord, by the time I got there, I was way past the borscht belt years. By the time I got there, I remember the backstage of the Concord vividly smelling of cat piss. It was bad.”

Now that she is also doing movies, and television, Susie doesn’t get to do as much stand up as she used to. “A lot of the time I take the summer off because my audiences are– you know, they’re away in the summer. I don’t know how many shows, maybe 70 a year. Whereas I used to do 400 a year when I was young.” Having such a long spanning career can have a few drawbacks, like when your audiences want to keep hearing your greatest hits from your earlier days.  “When I’m headlining,” she said, “sometimes people get disappointed if I don’t do certain old bits. Certain things– you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that” her audience sometimes complains. “Well I have new stuff.  You have to learn how to sprinkle it all in.”

As much as she loves doing stand up, it’s her versatility and different types of work that keeps her interested as a performer.  This summer, for example, she hasn’t done a lot of stand up, but she’s been busy.  She recently did a guest spot on Broad City for Comedy Central, guest starred on a new Fox (not Fox News!) comedy called “Weird Loners”, did a bunch of voiceovers including one for “American Dad”.  She also shot a pilot with David Schwimmer, for ABC. “I like the variety, I really do, I like mixing it up. If I just did stand up, I’d want to kill myself. If I just did acting work, I’d be bored out of my mind. It’s a good mix.”

Of course she will never give up stand up and addressed one of the biggest threats to stand up today– political correctness.  “I do think that political correctness is the death of comedy,” she said. “It’s the comedian’s job,” she said referring particularly to stand up comedians, “to tear it down. We’re not propagandists.” Essman believes that comedy’s job is to offend– not to hurt or be unkind– but to say what other people are thinking but afraid to say.  She mentioned Gilbert Gottfried as an example of an uncensored comedian. A few years ago, Gilbert got into trouble, and even lost his job as the spokesduck for Aflac, when he made a joke the deadly Tsunami in Japan. “That’s who Gilbert is, I’ve known Gilbert for 30 years. Don’t shut him up now, that’s part of his humor, that’s part of his comedy. So yeah, you could not follow him anymore if you don’t like it. Aflac can fire him if they don’t like it. But I don’t want Gilbert to stop being Gilbert, because Gilbert’s brilliant.” She added, “once you start getting into censoring yourself as a comic,” Essman said, “you’re not funny anymore.”

Robin Williams, who passed away just a few weeks ago, was another example of an uncensored mind. “I mean look, Robin was a classic example, this was a completely uncensored mind,” Essman said, calling his comedic style, brilliant.  “He just– his brain was on rapid fire and just went wherever it was going to go and I don’t think he ever censored himself.” Comedians, she explained, think a little bit differently than everyone else. “I think we see a little bit more than other people which is why we can filter it back out and spit it out and people are like, ‘oh my god I never thought of that or I never saw it that way.’But I think his brain in particular was a different neurological brain than most people. Most people do not think like he thought. He had different wiring up there.”

She credits women with being even more outspoken than men these days, and less likely to apologize for offending audiences.  “I think one of the reasons why women are so bold and outspoken was because they have to have some kind of…they have to be everything… more than men are.  They have to be better.”  But, she said, that wasn’t always the case.

I think that some of us were pioneers with that. If you look back at the women when I was growing up, whether it was Joan [Rivers] or Phyllis [Diller] — and literally there was a handful, there were hardly any — in order for them to be accepted publicly, they had to be somewhat self-deprecating. For example, Phyllis Diller who was so brilliantly funny, had to put on these crazy outfits. She couldn’t just go out there and be herself and be funny. It just wasn’t acceptable and slowly that started to change.”

Even though things were more difficult for women when she was first starting in comedy, she never liked to think of herself as a victim, or disadvantaged. “There’s a lot of women out there that were sour grapes,” she said, “and there would be a lot of women who were crying sexism, and people in clubs wouldn’t put two women on a show — which was insane — but it was true.  And I always felt that I’m not focusing on that. I’m going to be so good, they can’t deny me.”  So while other women were talking about sexism, Susie was pushing boundaries, talking about sex.  “The fact that I liked sex was something I didn’t hear women talking about when I was coming up.” She knew she had to have an original voice in order to stand out from what she called the “Seinfeld imitators.”   I think that, that’s what a lot of women have come to, is that in order to be seen and heard they need to be original and they need to be memorable. And it’s not like it’s a shock thing, we’re not hiding behind a joke or a false persona.  This is who we really are.  So that’s what I think that’s about.

What’s next for Susie Essman? “Everything’s up in the air. Curb coming back is up in the air, this pilot [with David Schwimmer] is up in the air. I know where I am next week which is in Vegas and beyond that I have no idea.”

Susie Essman will be appearing at the Venetian as part of the Lipshtick comedy show this weekend, September 5th and 6th.  You can follow Susie on Twitter @SusieEssman and visit her website SusieEssman.com for dates and more information.

 “Lipshtick: the Perfect Shade of Stand Up” marks the first time in the history of Las Vegas entertainment that a comedy stage will be performed on exclusively by female performers. Some of the funny women that have already headlined at the Sands Showroom include Heather McDonald and Iliza Schlesinger, Rita Rudner, Joy Behar and Caroline Rhea and Wendy Liebman.

For tickets and more information on “Lipshtick: The Perfect Shade of Stand Up”, go to the official “Lipshtick” website at Venetian.com

Upcoming Lipshtick Shows

• September 5 & 6: Susie Essman
• September 12 & 13: Natasha Leggero and Jen Kirkman
• September 19 & 20: Jennifer Coolidge
• September 27: Sara Schaefer and Nikki Glaser
• October 3 & 4: Lisa Lampanelli
• October 10 & 11: Loni Love
• October 31 & November 1: Wendy Williams – new addition!
• November 7 & 8: Roseanne Barr – new addition!
• November 28 & 29: Whitney Cummings
• December 26 & 27: Lisa Lampanelli

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