Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained 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 personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
