Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person 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 afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied 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 pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come 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 immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, 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 sick 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 split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew 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 jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – 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
