Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this space between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
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 a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
