Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist 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 spouse and as a chooser 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 deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place 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 recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “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, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”
‘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 period working there, which has been another source 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 remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 amazed that her story caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing 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 bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
