Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: 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 undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; 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 prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out 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 remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back 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 returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw 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 single mother. “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, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote caused controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility 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 manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware 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, 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 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
