Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic 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 controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to 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 a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
