Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “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 routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 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 white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 material.” 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
