🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra 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 feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘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 an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny