In 2018, while filming an episode of the TV show Who Do You Think You Are? in her hometown of Sarnia in Ontario, Canada, Katherine Ryan got into trouble: she fell in love.
Up to that point, many of her popular standup routines had been based around female empowerment and her life as a single mother. Ryan, who moved to the UK in 2008, was a shining light for anyone who, like her, believed a woman’s life could be complete without a long-term relationship or marriage. Then she got hitched.
“It was a nightmare,” Ryan admits. “It genuinely concerned me, not just reconnecting with Bobby and getting married, but then the pandemic was strange and I had children, so a lot of my life changed all at once. I also looked very different—I gained a lot of weight in my pregnancy. So I thought, ‘Is any facet of me still the same?... I was like, ‘What am I going to talk about?’”
Ryan and Bobby Kootstra, who’d dated when they were teenagers, had a civil partnership ceremony in Denmark nine months after rekindling their relationship. With both now based in London, they’re raising three children together: Violet, Ryan’s daughter from a previous relationship, and two toddlers Fred and Fenna. All five family members appear in the new reality TV series At Home with Katherine Ryan (on the TV channel U&W from 10th February and streamable for free on U), which explores Ryan’s balancing act between home life and completing an 80-date European tour. On the show, the couple undergo marriage therapy and intimacy coaching (“Who knew we were so repressed?” Ryan asks).
In the show, as in her standup, Ryan has her own views on what female empowerment looks like. As a young woman in Canada, she worked at Hooters, famous for its waitresses’ revealing uniforms. She later performed in their bikini pageant and visited the Playboy mansion. “It’s unfortunate that when you say you’re a feminist people want to challenge and dismantle what that means,” she tells me. “They say, ‘How can you be a feminist if you worked at Hooters?’ It was because I was 19 years old and I wasn’t a perfectly formed person. But I got a lot of benefit from the relationships I had working there. I’m still a feminist today, and it’s important to remind critics of feminism that it’s about empowering an entire society.”
Ryan’s been open, too, about having plastic surgery and Botox, and about her parenting, including how she started potty training her children “pretty much from the moment they’re born”. Part of her appeal is seemingly not caring about other people’s judgement. “I’ve always had a crystal-clear idea of what matters and what doesn’t,” she says.
One thing she does care about is comedy. “It’s a really exciting time in comedy currently. We’ve come full circle—there are people who feel very frustrated by the constraints on free speech, by the confusion between what is a joke and what is hate speech, by ‘cancel culture’ getting a little bit out of hand. People are ready for really funny, edgy comedy again.”
As a young female comedian, Ryan says she didn’t “personally experience toxicity from men in my industry”, despite being “in so many scenarios where I was the only woman.” But having heard rumours and accounts from other women, she did call Russell Brand a “sexual predator” to his face while filming a TV show together in 2018 (the interaction never aired) and alluded publicly, without naming Brand, to a famous comedian who she and others believed was “dangerous”.
She’s also used her profile to leave comedy in better shape for the female comedians coming after her. The reason she quit the panel show Mock The Week, she explains, is because the production team only ever allocated one seat to a woman; by “sitting in that chair” Ryan says she felt she was “preventing one of my female peers from having a go”.
“I’ve been very conscious of being the antithesis of Margaret Thatcher, who pulled up the ladder after herself,” Ryan tells me. “I never wanted to be an excuse why a production shouldn’t hire other women.”
