Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “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 mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive 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 surgically enhance; and coupled with 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 sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this area between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 nearby 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 familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned 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? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew 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 felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a notable 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
