Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
