Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “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 routines where she mentioned 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? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement 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 linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
