Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. 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 elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 root of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition 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 sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle 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 being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny