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Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.
‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed 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 explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? 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 raised until then as a single mother. “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, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She managed to leave 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 venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? 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 anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”
‘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, 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 rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” 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 established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
Brian Hernandez
A passionate writer and shopping enthusiast with a keen eye for quality products and lifestyle trends.
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