Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved 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 close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant 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 slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics 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 perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, 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 adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny