Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child 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 reduce, 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 touches on the heart of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar 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 an old flame, who she saw 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions 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 never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have 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 diagnosed something – I was quite unwell 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 subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny