Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. 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 elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
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 found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 surprised that her story provoked outrage – she got on with 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 outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, 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 hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 long 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 next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – 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
