Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock 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 unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; 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 keen for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? 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 anecdote caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate 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, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny