Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out 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 live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape 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 enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 told you have 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 problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny