A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny