Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; 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 keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 raised until then as a single mother. “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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 crossed so many red lines – 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 were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
