🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful 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 modest. If you went on stage 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 wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 flawed as a parent, as a partner 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 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 emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments 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 hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain 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 she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 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, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – 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