Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 liked.”
Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality 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 partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. 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 bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about 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? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny
