Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby 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 medications 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 feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return 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 first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “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, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for 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 being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit 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