Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock 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 off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “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 are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to 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 a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance 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. “They 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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
