‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.
The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”
‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’
The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking 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 in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.
“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people 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 eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”
Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”
‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’
She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”
She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”
‘I was aware I had jokes’
She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.
The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny
