Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this space between confidence and embarrassment. 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 private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return 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, reconnected 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to 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 another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned 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? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
