Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in 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 link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 amazed that her anecdote provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was told she had 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 informed about something – I was quite ill 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny