Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector 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 nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions 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 references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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
