Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great 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 modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape 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 remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, 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 references 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 relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was told she had 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 informed about 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 separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny