Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return 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 high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She did escape 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 topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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
