Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
