Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; 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 bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. 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 live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a single mother. “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, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
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 another source of discussion, 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 nude; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 most negative outcome. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – 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
