Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful 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 underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be human 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 pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
She got away 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 debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement 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 statements 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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard 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 most negative outcome. My logic 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking 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 simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a major 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
