A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; 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 maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny