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 craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold 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 unappealing’
The underlying theme 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 had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? 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 generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, 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 was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
