Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie 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 routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure 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 think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment 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 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 demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated 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 suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle 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, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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
