Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required 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 close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s renowned 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 strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “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 human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: 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 received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? 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 expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in 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 make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
