A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner 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 whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat 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 facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing 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 succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated 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 comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
