Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic 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 distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser 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 all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, 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 addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. 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 view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source 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 nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come 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 broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
