Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe 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 lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag 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 bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell 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 sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts 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 next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of 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 persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
