Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
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 enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated 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 type of place 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 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, met again her former partner, 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, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 suddenly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle 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 performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
