Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Irene Bremis is still bringing the funny at 59
In the living room of her family’s home, young Irene Bremis and her cousins put on shows for their aunts and uncles. These mini roasts of her aunts and uncles allowed a 7-year-old to show off her dead-on impressions of her Greek relatives, making all the adults howl with laughter. It was a peek into how her comedy persona would be years from now. These were Bremis’ early days crafting her crowd work.
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Years later, at Lexington High School in Massachusetts, her classmates voted her “Open Mouth, Insert Foot.” Her friend Rachel Dratch got “Class Clown.” Dratch would go on to Saturday Night Live. Bremis spent decades in the standup trenches (and Lucille Roberts gyms as a fitness instructor and personal trainer) following career advice that didn’t fit her, even though she’d known since those living room shows exactly what kind of comic she was.
Bremis (IG @irenebremis) started working the comic scene in New York City in the 1990s, a time of grunge. Female comics at the time, almost as a whole, dressed down, in part, as an effort to be taken seriously. Bremis showed up looking like a “stripper,” in her own words. She founded Hysteria, one of New York’s first all-female comedy showcases, at the Zinc Bar in the West Village. But still, when it came to her craft, she listened to everyone else.
“I actually denied my instincts going into standup, which set me back,” Bremis, now 59, says. The philosophy back then was “get up wherever you can, how often you can. You’re honing your five minutes, but you only have five minutes.” She followed it. She bombed at Pips in Brooklyn. A friend told her: “If you don’t bomb at Pips, you’re not a comic.” She kept going.
“On a cellular level, I knew I was a storyteller,” she says. “I knew I needed to go into the crowd, to be spontaneous. But I listened to everybody else about how to build a career. And it held me back.”
Therapy in spandex
Bremis moved to New York at 22 to pursue acting. She moved in with her sister and waitressed on the side like most of her comedic counterparts. She also had another hustle: fitness. She started teaching aerobics as a teenager and discovered it rewired her brain as much as her body.
“It was my therapy in spandex,” she told Bold Journey.
She taught at Lucille Roberts and other gyms for 40 years, winning best NYC fitness class twice. She trained comedians, celebrities and kept going on Zoom throughout COVID. The parallel to standup wasn’t lost on her. Both require holding a room, bringing energy even when you don’t feel it.
The hardest part of standup, Bremis found, is making people laugh when you’re sad. When her father died, she performed her solo show Hire Irene days later. She wanted to cancel. Her friends pushed her.
“It turned out to be incredibly healing,” she told Bold Journey. “Laughter heals. That’s why I became a comedian.”
Still, for decades, Bremis felt stuck. She was following a playbook that didn’t fit. Now, at 59, she’s having the career and notoriety she always should have. Not because someone discovered her, but because she stopped listening to everyone else and started listening to herself.
“The whole fallacy of age — I don’t subscribe to that. I’ve never been more secure, more clear of who I am.” — Irene Bremis
Her comedy special Sweetie is streaming on Amazon Prime among other services. Her podcast Woo Woo, co-hosted with her old high school friend Dratch, has taken off and given Bremis a newfound celebrity. On the show, the two explore supernatural, paranormal, and unexplained phenomena.
The old high school friends make a perfect comedic pair. Bremis brings a kind of outer-borough swagger. She’s a Greek immigrant kid, brash and unfiltered and unapologetically equipped with horoscope knowledge as well as her very own pendulum. Dratch plays her daffy, inquisitive counterpart with deep comedy legends as friends. Their mutual adoration is refreshing. The show feels inexplicably warm and a known pleasure like sitting at a table with your favorite, funniest aunties at Christmas.
Bremis is bringing the funny even through the tragedy
Bremis’ comedy heroes reflect her vibe: Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, fearless and brash personalities. But there’s also Richard Simmons and Suzanne Somers, who understood that wellness and joy were inseparable. It’s a fitting jumble of influences for a woman who spent her life spreading wellness as a personal trainer and laughter as a comic.
Bremis’ life was shaped just like big Greek tragedies are. There was lots of love but also struggle. Her father was a brilliant storyteller who’d hold court at dinner spinning hyperbolic tales, but he had undiagnosed high-functioning autism and was exploited at work because he couldn’t read social cues. Her brother is severely autistic. She learned to weaponize humor early to protect him, to make friends, to survive.
“Tragedy births comedy,” Bremis says. “Without pain, you can never have comedy. It’s a survival mechanism. You learn to use humor as a tool. You learn to implement humor to make friends, and in my case, to protect my brother.”
Her mother, Despina, taught her to speak freely but always rooted in love and to diffuse life’s challenges with humor. But watching her mother carry the weight of caring for her brother and father shaped some of Bremis’ choices.
“I saw what an arduous thing it was for my mother to go through,” she says. “And so I decided, you know what, I’m pulling the plug on offspring.”
Instead, she became a different kind of caretaker, the one who brings the jokes.
“I’m most proud as a comedian of making my autistic brother laugh and others who are hurting laugh,” she says. “He knows I’m bringing the jokes. I go to his appointments with him. I don’t care what doctor’s there. I’m going to put on a complete comedy show while he’s undergoing procedures that are scary for him. I bring the funny. That’s my job.”
Cancer, loss, and trusting herself
Dratch, who has known Bremis since their high school days in Lexington, says her friend is fundamentally unchanged.
“I think of Irene in high school as being her own unique self, being brash and funny and a character not fitting into a high school mold,” Dratch says. “What you see is what you get. It’s not like there’s Private Irene and Public Irene. They’re one and the same. She is a very loyal friend and family member, and in everyone’s corner which is one of the reasons she is beloved by so many.”
In 2025, Bremis was diagnosed with colon cancer, a five-centimeter tumor. Her doctors recommended chemotherapy. She refused.
“Chemo terrified me more than cancer did,” she wrote in an essay for The Kind Life. She overhauled her diet, researched obsessively, cut things out, added things, worked with doctors who were aligned with her. The tumor shrank. She had surgery without chemo, without a colostomy bag, just as she wanted.
Bremis had cancer when filming her comedy special Sweetie (directed by Onur Tukel, and produced by Dratch), but did not know it. March is colorectal cancer awareness month, and Bremis wants to stress how important it is to get a colonoscopy.
Her mother, a fearless woman who raised Bremis to be “independent and unafraid,” the two ingredients she considers necessary for standup, died recently. The loss is immense.
“Every little moment that I had to take a pause from standup. My cancer, the death of my mother. All these things made me more unique,” she says. “I have more to talk about. You reach different people.”
Looking ahead
Bremis lives on Staten Island with her husband, a firefighter and basketball coach. She jokes that she’s a “hostage” there.
She’s planning on shooting another comedy special in December 2026 and possibly a memoir. And she knows exactly who she is.
“The whole fallacy of age. I don’t subscribe to that,” she says. “I’ve never been more secure, more clear of who I am.”
She always knew. It just took her a while to trust it.
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