Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant 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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter 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 belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
