Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, 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 slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat 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 controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps 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 notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
