Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 parent, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained 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 life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back 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 returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of 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 interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic 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 was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny