Put your coat on! Comedian Julie Burke’s Irish Mammy skits are comedy gold

She is specifically talking about her nurse and school secretary skits, including one recent video referencing the nationwide strike and is hopeful that her videos are driving awareness of how important their work is, albeit in a hilarious way.

"These women are often unseen in our society, and it's really important to me that we highlight how strong and resilient and incredibly hard-working they are.

"I want to shine a light on everybody. I do it on my professional page all the time. I highlight women every week. I do a spotlight and I spotlight a female businesswoman, and I talk about how amazing they are, and I encourage people to go follow them and connect with them.

"I don't just do this on social media. I practice what I preach. I'm very passionate about lifting women up."

Julie's professional life is working in credit control and anti-money laundering for IFAC, a role that's earned her the accolade of Networker of the Year at the Galway Network Ireland Galway Businesswoman of the Year Awards 2025.

 It's a world away from her comedy, which you'll find here, but despite her success, she has no plans to make a career out of it or even monetize her accounts.

"My theory is that I wouldn't enjoy it the way I do. I have a career, and I worked very hard for it, and for me, it's about like the shortest distance between two people is humor. Laughter is so healing to so many people, and I have women all over the world sharing that with me."

Those tuning into Julie's sketches will instantly see people they know from their everyday lives in her characters, most notably, the famed Irish mammy, and not just in Ireland, which she feels is why they have taken off to such an extent.

"I think everybody seems to see a little bit of themselves or their own mother in the characters that I play, and obviously it's a very exaggerated version, but to be fair, people say that's exactly my mother [and] I found myself there the other day, and the words fell out of my mouth that my mother said, and I couldn't believe it, and I said I'd never be like my mother. We've all done that.

"We've all been guilty of saying, I'm never going to say that, so I think that's why we identify with it so much."

So, as a mum-of-two, is she like her characters in real life?

"I definitely channel it... and it could be something really, really small in the day, where I could even be having a conversation with a friend, and they could say something, and I trigger something from my own childhood, and I go, okay, and then I play on that, and I really exaggerate it."

Given her hectic schedule, it's a wonder that she has time to make content, but she says the connection she finds with people keeps her motivated,

"So many women from abroad share that with me and say, 'Oh Julie, it feels like home' or 'I emigrated 20 years ago and I never lost the accent and I absolutely love feeling like I'm back home' in my own country, and that is huge to me. That's such a compliment."

Julie tells another story of a woman who plays her videos to her sister over a landline because she doesn't have a smartphone, and how her followers, on hearing the story, wanted to club together to buy her one so that she can also watch them.

She also loves being able to take her sketches to the next level and recounts getting a message from a teacher saying that the secretary in the school had loudly announced over that morning for Billy Murphy and Nicola Quinn (two of her characters) to come to the office immediately.

The students were baffled, but the teachers loved the joke and on hearing this, Julie couldn't resist a good-natured prank and phoned up the secretary pretending to be a mother whose son had forgotten his books and asking her to page him. When the secretary asked for the name, she replied Billy Murphy! prompting screams of "Oh My God!"

Speaking of the famed troublemaker, Julie divulged that he is actually based on a boy she went to school with, and Julie also shares that she developed her love of comedy growing up with six siblings.

"I grew up in a big family of five sisters, and my mother had to have a sense of humor in order to raise all six of us. So, we grew up around quite a bit of sarcasm and a lot of fun."

Given that she is the focal point of so much of Julie's comedy, what's the best lesson that her mother taught her?

"I think the best lesson I learned from my own mother is that you can do it by yourself. It's great to have support, but stop looking for approval from everybody else. You are absolutely able and capable of doing anything in your life that you want to achieve. If you have a partner in crime to do that with, that's phenomenal. But stop waiting for everyone to give you permission to do things. You're not going to get it. You have to just go for it yourself and push forward. And I absolutely do that."

* This article was originally published on Evoke.ie.