Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
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 another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major 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
