🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. 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 alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit 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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick 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 change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny