Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act 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 trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an focus 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 youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial 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 kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 lone parent. “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, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated 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 suddenly struggling.”
‘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, made the decision 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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew 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 knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
