Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back 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 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, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand 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. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit 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
