‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving 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 stay there for a lifetime 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 first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I was aware I had material’
She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny
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