Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.
‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”
Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved 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 human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; 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 off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding 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 meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; 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 keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back 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 high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we started’
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 debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned 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? Sex work? 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 surprised that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”
‘I knew I had jokes’
She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
