Susie Essman appears at the Palm Beach Improv at CityPlace on Sunday. (HBO)

They share a first name and the same head of dark curls, but Susie Essman says there’s “only a small aspect” of her in Susie Greene, the gleefully profane wife she plays on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. And sometimes, this is a letdown for fans who approach her.

“People walk up to me — this is how bizarre my life has become — and beg me to call them a bald f— or a fat f—, whatever is appropriate to them,” says Essman, who comes to the Palm Beach Improv for a one-night stand tonight.

“I’ll be very gracious and you’ll see their faces visibly drop in disappointment. But there is a positive aspect to it. There’s something about people expecting you to be nasty that makes your life a little bit easier. People live in fear a little bit. And when I show up at a restaurant, they give me a table. Fear can be a positive.”

Essman, whom kids might know as the voice of the bullying alley cat in Disney’s Bolt, recently booked a lot of face time with fans on her current tour, which combines stand-up gigs with signings to promote her new book, What Would Susie Say? It’s taken her everywhere from New York to Napa to a reading last week at the Miami Book Fair International.

“It’s been nuts,” says the 54-year-old Bronx native. “I’ve been enjoying the (book) events, but I’m not enjoying all the traveling. … I was in New York doing press for 10 days, and combined with all the stand-up, it’s a little overwhelming. But these are good problems to have.”

The book, which offers both humorous and moving tidbits from Essman’s life, is subtitled Bulls— Wisdom About Love, Life and Comedy, because “I didn’t want to be presumptuous, like I’m some sage person. We went back and forth with the title. Obviously, there’s a lot of real wisdom in the book about children, marriage and aging.

“But I was covering myself with adding the word ‘bulls—.’ There’s some stuff there just to be funny, from my act. I think you should take everybody’s wisdom with a grain of salt and live by your own gut.”

There are some differences between Essman’s real life and the life of her fictional Curb alter ego, who regularly lets loose with blistering and blisteringly funny tirades at husband Jeff (Jeff Garlin) and his misanthropic client Larry David, played by David, the show’s creator and writer.

Susie Essman, the interviewee, is extremely nice and funny. But Susie Essman the stand-up comic loves long, shocking runs of words that cannot be printed here. One critic commented, lovingly, that she has “taken female cursing to longshoreman levels.”

So this means that there’s a gender difference in cursing?

“It’s not ladylike, I guess,” she says. “I don’t have an answer to that. I did a Friars Club roast, and women weren’t even allowed in them until 1990. They were these filthy blue events where men felt they couldn’t speak that way in front of women. As (a female comic), I had to walk a fine line, so you had all these old guys, like Alan King and Jack Carter, and Buddy Hackett. You wanted to be one of the boys, but not be so vulgar that it was shocking and a turn-off to them. I was able to accomplish that, but then I thought of (early comic) Sophie Tucker. She was really, really filthy.”

The double standard partially explains why Essman didn’t try stand-up until she was 28 years old, even though “I was always funny as a kid. But then I became a teenager, and boys are supposed to be funny, not girls. I became a closet funny person, with my girlfriends. But in my senior year in college I started thinking, ‘(Forget) this. I gotta go do this thing.’”

Then again, Essman says she’s not one to dwell on double standards and outdated misconceptions, because they’ve served to make her stronger, and better.

“People say, ‘It’s a sexist business,’ but it’s a sexist world. It’s no different than anything else,” she says. “The way I look at it, I never wanted to be a crybaby or a victim. I remember my dad, who was a doctor, told me, ‘Always go to a female doctor, because they have to work that much harder, so they’re probably better.’

“I equate that to comedy. It’s easier for a mediocre male than a mediocre female. But who wants to be mediocre? I want to be so good, they can’t deny me.”

Susie Essman 7 p.m. today. Palm Beach Improv, 550 S. Rosemary Ave., West Palm Beach
Information: (561) 833-1812