Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human 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 slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving 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 live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
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 an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny