Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, 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. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary 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 took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with 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 maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve 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 feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a lone parent. “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, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated 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 instantly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated 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 following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
