🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie 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 comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an focus 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 young person, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant 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 talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay 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 spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny