A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress 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 liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected 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 bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality 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 started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, 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 industry was riddled 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