Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. 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 liked.”
Then there was her material, which she describes 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 boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child 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 slim down, 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 touches on the heart of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door 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 grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of 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 chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny