Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to 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 stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant 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 vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 ups and downs, 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 nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny