Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, 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 heart of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 immediately poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 unwell 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after 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 winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
