Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis 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 young person, 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 root of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, 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, behaviors and missteps, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial 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 type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? 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 story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in business, was told she had 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill 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 are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy 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 belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
