A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps 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 especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we originated’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for 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 persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
