Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled 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 raised 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, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? 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 fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure 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 felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – she won a notable 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
