Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life 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 started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She managed to leave 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – 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 talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt 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 simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious 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
