Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off 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 radiate motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful 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 modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
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 advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child 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 reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; 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 thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? 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 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, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
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 liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
