🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the 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 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 had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid 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 while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps 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 particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to 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 period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 shocked that her anecdote generated anger – 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 cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny