Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt 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 antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime 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 she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny
