Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.
‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.
The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”
‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’
The underlying theme 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 youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's 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, 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 cared for 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, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”
‘We are always connected to where we started’
She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 amazed that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”
‘I was aware I had comedy’
She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny