Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person 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 afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; 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 feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major 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
