Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector 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 all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “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, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned 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? Transaction? 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 amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
