Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident 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 alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out 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 considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable 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 an old flame, 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, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? 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 surprised that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed 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 unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 lengthy 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 white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny