🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire 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 insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications 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 female emancipation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, 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, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I go back 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 first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? 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 amazed that her story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny