Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. 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 lifetime and have their friends' 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 teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 raised until then as a single mother. “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, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
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 a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? 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 expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, 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 bias – 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