‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.
The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her routines, 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 enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”
‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’
The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to 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 sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.
“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 lone parent. “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, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’
She got away 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 found it fun – 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”
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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”
‘I felt confident I had comedy’
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny
