Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 human as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to 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 long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 next door 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 she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, 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 be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? 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 shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret 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. “They 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 disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny