Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence 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 young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with 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 sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. 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 long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
