Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat 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 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition 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 sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape 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 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 was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”
‘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 Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, 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 remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated 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 suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
