Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 summarises simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse 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 little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they reside in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “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, chic, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity 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 different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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
