🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. 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 eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar 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 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (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 amazed that her story generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny