Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with 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 bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she went out with 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 solo mom. “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, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions 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 brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated 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 chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
