Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant 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 speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; 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 taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled 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