Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based 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 distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear 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 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 advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime 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 didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 lone parent. “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, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a major 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
