Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: 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 treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period 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 satisfaction and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell 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 subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
