When the Canadian comedian first arrived in the UK, she says she was instantly poor. But her career soon began to take off. She discusses provocation, perfectionism and telling people her secrets
‘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.”
