Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences 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 alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She managed to leave 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp 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. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick 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 change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
