🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing 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 keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay 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 grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised 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, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

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

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point 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 nude; 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 red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry 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