Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
