Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 lifetime and have one another's children. When I return 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 went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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 cannot completely leave behind where we started, 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 loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in business, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense 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 felt 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – 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