Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, 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 avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure 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 consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, 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 mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit 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