Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back 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 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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated 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
