Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. 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 connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – 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 expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. 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 chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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
