Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, 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. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; 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 prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘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 Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? 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 surprised that her story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions 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 mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a major 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
