Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 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 afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 addresses the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals 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 dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
