Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to 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 glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 gets to the root of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, 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, choices and errors, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical 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 kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny