Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, 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 core of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime 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 teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 fellatio sequence provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew 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 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny