Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
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 profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – 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 sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
