🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “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, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 shocked that her story caused anger – she liked 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 purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

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 told you have 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 separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence 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 bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny