Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, 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 experiences, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing 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 view it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain 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 grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – 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 meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for 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 being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
