Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, 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 boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your underwear 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 child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; 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 eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit 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 high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “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, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”
‘We are always connected to where we came from’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity 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 distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “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 comedy’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny
