🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps 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 particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

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, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable 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