🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

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 youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

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 debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense 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 faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated with bias – she won a major 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