A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. 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 off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; 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 emphasis 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 lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; 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 sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps 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 urban and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
