Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals 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 close to their parents and stay 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 teenage boyfriend? She traveled back 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”
‘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 period working there, 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 misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance 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 different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I felt confident I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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