Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement 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 remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ 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 simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker 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 took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme 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 facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell 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 sense it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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, chic, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? 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 cracked open something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was found to have 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental 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 felt 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
