Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding 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 meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back 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, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. 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 inaccuracy: “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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
