Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs 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 root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. 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 spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘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 Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic 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, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated 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
