Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an focus 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 had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial 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 challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay 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 didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She did escape 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 found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into 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 faith 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 permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny