🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – 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