Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant 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 experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
