Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra 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 baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to 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 kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny