Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; 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 unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 touches on the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 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 grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 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, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy 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 faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled 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
