Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. 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. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message 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 jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny