🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

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 boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied 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 kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time 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, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, 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 brings up the linking of certain remarks 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 struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 logic 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a notable 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