🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-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 won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty 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 self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant 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 being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and missteps, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, 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 knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry 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 created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny