Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. 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 wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: 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 received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 long 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 high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
