Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child 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 treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad managed 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 pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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
