Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe 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 strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, 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 addresses the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 cared for 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, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 struggling.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
