Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, 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, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “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, portable. 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 a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
