Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 problems, if we are still together 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
