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 lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 human as a mother, as a significant other 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. 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 feel it like a link.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back 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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’
She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? 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 absolutely were not expected to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”
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 disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”
‘I felt confident I had material’
She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny