Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications 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 core of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; 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 while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
