Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian 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 avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage 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 baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 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, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, 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 an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
