Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers 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 glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 explains 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors 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 particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? 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 definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was found to have 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
