🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: 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 received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to 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 sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, 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 experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in 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 link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? 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 brought up until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 surprised that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny