‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child, Holland, to the Guardian offices and the baby is lying in a little blanket-nest on the table. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound, but I hadn’t noticed the noise, as I was distracted by how adorable the baby is. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted by anything.
The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”
Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”
The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.
“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviours and mistakes, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”
Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry (or rather, enter into a civil partnership with) her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia to film an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”
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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about 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? Predatory behaviour? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.
Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up Donald Trump supporters comparing his comments on grabbing women by the pussy to Beyoncé singing about sex in her song Formation. “Trump supporters 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 instantly poor.”
She got a job in sales, was diagnosed with lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed with 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 ups and downs, 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.
The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as one of those 1980s John Cleese films. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking 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 simply, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with sexism – she won the Funny Women award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a turgid, continuing debate about whether women could be funny. All the bookers were male, the comperes would performatively forget her name, or apologise to the audience that they had a girl coming on next, because of political correctness. She says female standups were “discouraged from being feminine … I think we were doing our best just to be invisible or emulate what the boys were doing. Bookers would say, ‘Women will be jealous of you, men will be distracted by you.’ But that wasn’t true.”
Yet she loved being the underdog. “If you could win an audience back from there, it really felt good,” Ryan says. And she started winning newcomer awards. Her agent suggested she do an hour at the Edinburgh fringe, and she put together a sort of cabaret, dressed in a pageant tutu, because she didn’t have the material for 60 minutes of jokes. “Critically, that was panned far and wide. Very fair, bad reviews. But I think people admired my balls from the start.”
She is scrupulously vague about Violet’s father, and has landed on an origin story for her daughter. “I tell Violet that she was very powerful. She was like a star in the sky. She wanted to be born. And to be born, she had to bring us together, at that time, and I’m glad that she was powerful enough to make that happen.” But Ryan realised pretty soon that Violet’s father “wasn’t going to be beneficial to us, financially or logistically”. From that point on, at still only 25, Ryan just got her head down. “I was going home to a baby. I didn’t mess around, I didn’t stay out for drinks, I didn’t have flatmates. I’d had a youth already – I didn’t take drugs or do anything too wild back in Canada, but I went to the Playboy Mansion, I got to be a podium dancer, I got to work at Hooters, we had fake IDs at 14, we were having bush parties. I’d done all that. By the time I was in London, I thought: ‘Now let’s get serious.’” Besides, she felt she couldn’t go back to Canada as a single parent. “There was a time when I really felt shame about it. There was this sense that I had chosen badly; in heteronormative relationships, women are the gatekeepers of who gets to be a father.”
When Violet was six months old, Ryan successfully auditioned for Victoria Pile’s semi-improvised TV sitcom Campus – she was the worst thing in it, she says now, but the money kept her afloat for the next two years, and she’ll take that as a win. Then she got a spot on 8 Out of 10 Cats, and “after that, the phone didn’t stop ringing”. The way she tells it, she almost manifested her career. “Armed with the knowledge that my daughter deserved a really great life, and that I had cocked up enough things for us that I had to make good fast, and I knew I had jokes, I would overwrite and overprepare for auditions. I would walk into those rooms completely believing that I deserved to be there, that I would make the show better and that I should be cast.”
Ryan has also never observed the celebrity omertà around money, the collective fantasy that everyone’s just doing what they love and, oh, wow, someone just sent a cheque to lil ol’ me. “I love money. I also think it’s provocative to talk about that. When I made The Duchess for Netflix, the lead female character, who was not based on my life but was obviously inspired by elements of it, did pottery and was really rich. It was questioned by the production company, all the way along. ‘Why does the daughter have a horse? She can’t have a horse.’ I was, like: ‘Why not? My daughter has a horse.’ Anyway, they killed the horse. No horse.”
Her latest show, Out of Order, which returns for a second series, is a comics’ ensemble piece that she co-hosts with the comedian Rosie Jones. In a concept that feels almost essence-of-Ryan, teams of comedians compete to place members of the public in the right order in categories such as “who earns the most?” and “who’s had the most one-night stands?”. It has been eye-opening for her to see the abuse Jones gets online: “Rosie’s got being a lesbian, being disabled and being a woman, and the type of people who are happy to vocally abuse her, from their work account, just goes to show why it’s so necessary to have her front and centre. The show has loads of contributors who are gender-fluid or disabled or some type of alternative, but at the core of it, it’s just so funny.”
She’s interesting on politics, never overtly agitprop, instinctively countercultural. “I think comedians have always decorated the truth with little lies to make you laugh. Politicians decorate a lie with little truths so that you almost believe them. So I think we’re like the photonegative of each other, though all of us need an audience and need to be liked, we share that in common.” She believes the comic’s purpose is nobler. “The real provocation is just demanding that people stop bullshitting themselves and each other.”
