Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 sense it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
