Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential 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 infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive 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 while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, 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 remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
