Irma

Irma is a waitress and recurring character from the Garfield comic strip. Her first appearance was on June 9, 1979 and her latest appearance was on March 2, 2025. Irma is the owner and the only waitress of her diner, along with Chef Tony and Bubba. The diner is occasionally visited by Jon Arbuckle and Garfield.

Physical appearance

Irma has short, stringy black hair which is covered by a hair net. She wears glasses, a waiter uniform with a name badge, an apron and gray socks with blue shoes. In older strips, she has brown hair. In later strips, she occasionally has a pencil on her ear.

Personality

Irma has often been shown to be eccentric, doing strange things such as dressing as a chicken, punishing a potato by smacking it, or even shaving her legs on the counter. A common running gag is her giving customers old, or inedible food, such as horseshoes in meals, or pouring spilled coffee through a wet towel. Despite this, she is very friendly and loyal towards Garfield and Jon, and gladly serves them their food.

Trivia

• In the strip from August 8, 1981, Jon is shown flirting with Irma.
• Odie has not yet met her.
• She is one of the few regular characters that has rarely appeared outside the comic strip. One exception was in Garfield Caught In The Act, where she makes cameo appearances as part of the password section and the Whack-A-Character game.
• Jim Davis has revealed that he borrowed Irma's name, but not her personality, from his aunt Irma.
• In the strip from May 26, 1985, she was shown with red hair.
• In the strip from August 11, 2024, other customers are shown suffering the same effects from her food as Garfield and Jon.
• She runs the diner 24 hours a day with no help, although she does have chefs who cook the food.
• She has appeared 91 times as of the January 1st, 2017, making her the 19th most frequently-shown character.
• She made a cameo appearance on Jon Arbuckle's comic book in The Garfield Show episode "The Caped Avenger Rides Again!"

Food

Irma usually does not serve food in a tasty, or even edible, way, such as:

• Sticking her finger into Jon's coffee to check if it's hot (January 27, 1977 (Jon))
• Slapping a bad potato. (June 9, 1979)
• Doing the same to Jon's coffee 2½ years later. (October 19, 1979)
• Serving Jon coffee while roller-skating at high speed. (January 26, 1980)
• Being open to serve scrambled eggs and pigs in a blanket with wings. (May 22, 1985)
• Sleeping on Jon's hamburger. (May 24, 1985)
• Serving Jon an egg and advising him to forget about where it came from. (May 25, 1985)
• Serving Jon a burger and fries with one of her false eyelashes. (May 26, 1985)
• Being open to serve hamburger flambé, French fries flambé, and chili flambé due to a fire in the kitchen. (June 24, 1986)
• Demonstrating her fast food service award by literally throwing drinks at Garfield's and Jon's faces. (June 26, 1986)
• Giving Garfield and Jon a "Saturday Special" that was one week old. (June 27, 1986)
• Offering Jon a scoop of ice cream from the the floor. (June 28, 1986)
• Giving Jon coffee squeezed out of the wet towel she cleaned coffee another customer spilled. (July 31, 1986)
• Serving coffee that tastes like turpentine and offering tea that tastes like transmission fluid. (March 15, 1988)
• Offering too salty, too greasy, and burnt as the only kinds of eggs available. (May 17, 1988)
• The "chicken surprise" involving Irma putting on a chicken mask and shouting "SURPRISE!" twice. (September 17, 1988)
• Serving a burger patty as "burger", and a "deluxe burger" as a burger with a bun. (November 9, 1988)
• Accidentally serving dog food to Jon. (March 9, 1989)
• Not closing the diner after her cook came to work with anthrax. (March 16, 1992)
• Serving Jon meatloaf with a hoof and Garfield a burger with a horseshoe. (March 19, 1992)
• Being open to serve fresh ham from a live pig. (July 14, 1999)
• Offering orange juice, sauerkraut juice, grapefruit juice, and pickle juice. (July 15, 1999)
• Being open to serve a 5-pound patty of ground beef on a bun as the "He-Man Burger". (July 16, 1999)
• Serving coffee while wearing golf shoes. (July 17, 1999)
• Being open to serve chicken with a fever. (October 5, 1999)
• Being open to serve a sad burnt cow as a well-done hamburger with extra onions. (October 6, 1999)
• Serving a meatloaf with two horns in it. (October 7, 1999)
• Serving mashed potatoes in ice cream cones. (October 8, 1999)
• Serving a chicken salad with a hair in it. (October 9, 1999)
• Leaving feathers in Jon's omelette, and a bird beak in Garfield's. (March 20, 2000)
• Offering to serve a tuna special that killed her first husband while he ate it. (March 21, 2000)
• Aging cheese by leaving it in her pickup for six months. (March 22, 2000)
• Serving Jon a real live lobster. (March 23, 2000)
• Giving the coffee choices as regular and decaf. (March 24, 2000)
• Being open to serve fish made from a coughing chef. (March 5, 2002)
• Refusing to serve their "Pan-fried Ugly Fish" without a head, as otherwise, it would not be 'ugly'. (March 8, 2002)
• Being open to serve ticklish ribs. (March 9, 2002)
• Being open to serve "more exotic" food like aardvark tartare. (August 6, 2002)
• Offering cooked and raw as the only kinds of potato available. (August 7, 2002)
• Offering chili with a release form to sign. (August 8, 2002)
• Being open to serve a hamburger with streamers. (August 10, 2002)
• The chef leaving his cell phone in Garfield's meal. (May 29, 2005)
• Offering beef, turkey, chicken, tofu, veggie, buffalo, and ostrich as the kinds of hamburger available. (April 9, 2007)
• Performing the Chicken Dance by serving Garfield and Jon two whole chickens and literally making them dance. (April 10, 2007)
• Serving Jon and Garfield coffee that accidentally included Mexican jumping beans and calling it "Jumpin' Java". (April 11, 2007)
• Taking dust from the floor and making a special called the “dust bunny surprise“. (April 12, 2007)
• Using the words "soup" and "stew" interchangeably. (April 14, 2007)
• Serving Jon chicken soup with wings floating around in it. (October 7, 2010)
• Serving Jon soup with a tooth in it. (May 29, 2013)
• Serving water from her hands. (March 27, 2015)
• Serving chicken from a poultry truck that overturned up the road from the diner. (March 30, 2017)
• Putting water into buttermilk pancakes while the buttermilk went into the coffeemaker. (June 1, 2017)
• Swatting a live fly in Jon's mashed potatoes. (July 2, 2017)
• Serving soup cans with drinking straws. (September 24, 2017)
• Offering a triple-bypass burrito with a waiver to sign. (November 9, 2019)
• Having a whole menu filled with overcooked, lumpy, greasy, stale, moldy, rock-hard "food", including giving options to have a fly or gnat float in the soup. (February 28, 2021)
• Offering frozen and melted as the only kinds of ice cream available. (March 11, 2021)
• The semi-annual changing of the fryer grease. (July 5, 2022)
• Deep-frying a milkshake. (July 21, 2022)
• Offering super thick or extra chunky coffee as the only kinds of coffee available. (October 1, 2022)
• Offering to serve a tough steak as the "Hacksaw Special". (November 19, 2022)
• Offering "Healthy Breakfast" as 4 eggs, pancakes, waffles, bacon, ham, sausage, fried potatoes, and a sprig of parsley. (October 21, 2023)
• Serving hamburgers after a bug zapper was installed over the grill. (March 14, 2024)
• Offering to serve mole rat fritters. (April 9, 2024)
• Serving Jon a chicken salad sandwich with feathers and Garfield a Western omelette with a saddle bore. (April 11, 2024)
• Serving Jon meatloaf with heavy mashed potatoes that caused him to bend his knife. (April 12, 2024)
• Waking up a chicken after Jon ordered over-easy eggs. (April 13, 2024)
• Serving eggs with ghost peppers, habanero peppers, cayenne peppers, and Carolina Reaper peppers. (August 11, 2024)
• Demonstrating her new Gonggoosh beverage by literally playing a gong. (March 2, 2025)
• Giving Jon and Garfield meatloaf, gravy and pie like her grandma used to make, the “Worst Cook Eeeveeeer”. (April 3, 2025)

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