Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 describes simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the 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 true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached 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 definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions 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 comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt 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 comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny