Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery 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 picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
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 young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. 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 link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. 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 long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – 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 breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed 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 consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic 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, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – 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
