Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived 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 see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along 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 partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured 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 alienating’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned 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 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, chic, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy 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 faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
