Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
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 establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; 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 red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up 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 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
