Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra 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 facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community 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 recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went 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 raised 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, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious 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
