A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She got away 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 debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – 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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
