🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved 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, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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 simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors 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 lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 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, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? 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 surprised that her story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to 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 break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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