🔗 Share this article

‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer 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 afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus 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 lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant 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 said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return 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 high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she went out with 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 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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, 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 comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale 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 extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny