Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage 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 child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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