Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, 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 takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector 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 deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing 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 link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 cared for 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, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape 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 enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
