Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person 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 fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: 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 undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”
Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 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 are always connected to where we started, it appears.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick 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 haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
