Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite 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 underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, 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 addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 lengthy 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after 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 winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a major 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
