A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty 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 went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker 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 nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat 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 facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 immediately poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny
