Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured 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 consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, 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, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain 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 grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. 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 dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had 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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after 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 belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
