Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states 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 performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure 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 went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, 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 stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit 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 her former partner, 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, 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 mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a notable 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