Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains 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 enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape 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 enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
