Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 partner and as a picker 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 performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 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, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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
