Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift 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, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; 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 off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. 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 link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – 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 shocked that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny