Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise 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, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit 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 liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed 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? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
