Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
