Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat 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 facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, 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 next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
