Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto 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 beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure 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 think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 haven’t split up 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 following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter 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 confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
