Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire 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 real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, 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 touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (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 discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
