A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, 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, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts 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 longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, 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 equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny
