🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire 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 material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable 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 current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, 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 life events, actions and errors, they live in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ 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 hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had 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 informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene 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