Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed 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? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
