Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, 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 boob job 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 picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's 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 first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
