Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic 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 won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect 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 strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. 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 eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 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, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware 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 simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry 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 established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny