Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby 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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition 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 sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they reside in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – 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 sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance 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 never have moved 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 felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious 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
