Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “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, portable. 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 enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 anecdote caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable 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
