Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions 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 references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” 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 care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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
