Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, 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 removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’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, 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard 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 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 didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a major 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
