Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse 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 nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; 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 pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell 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 view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving 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 live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return 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 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – 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
