A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person 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 routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock 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 drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She went 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “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, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 fellatio sequence caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated 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 poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
