Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child 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 reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live 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 high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets 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? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would never have moved 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 instantly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit 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 comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
