Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical 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 kind of town where people are very pleased 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 shocked that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had comedy’
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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence 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 riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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
