Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay 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 was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 told you have something – I was quite unwell 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
