🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 human as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

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 venue (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 surprised that her anecdote provoked anger – 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 discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through 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