A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God 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 late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively community theater 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 perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable 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 traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated 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 next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major 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
