Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed 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 infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they reside in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, 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 loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, 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 sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through 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