A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker 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 nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs 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 core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “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, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
