Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, 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 without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live 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 she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 raised 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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
