🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant 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 drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation 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 perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s 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 traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed 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? Sex work? 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 amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny