🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. 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 prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she saw 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 another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “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 sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

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 informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny