Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie 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 describes simply: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: 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 slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she saw 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (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 mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 diagnosed 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 was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – 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
