Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”
Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker 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 entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 heart of how feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, 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 nearby 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 recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “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 material’
She got a job in sales, was told she had 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 diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
