Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 wanted.”
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 enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, 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 touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? 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 shocked that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions 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 brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in retail, 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
