It wouldn’t be free of complication, but Katherine Ryan would like to have another baby. “And a facelift,” she says, after a short pause.
Before or after?
“Definitely after, and that’s the trick. You’d waste a facelift if you had a facelift before a baby. You have to finish having all of your babies and then have a facelift.”
Well, I say, that seems very Joan Rivers. (Ryan, who is Irish-Canadian, has long been compared to the late US comedian.)
“It’s all fun,” she says. “If people are paying good money, getting a babysitter, going out to dinner and paying for parking to come and see me, I owe them a facelift at the very least.”
Appearing fresh and filler-free in the redbrick bowels of the Merrion Hotel, in Dublin, Ryan says that she “should probably start manifesting” the comedy work she will line up once her 100-date Battleaxe stand-up tour, now about halfway through, is over.
The cosmetic-procedures talk, though sincere, serves as a sort of counterpoint to one of her chief plans, which is to spend time with her family, and possibly try – though she’s conscious she’s 41 – to have a fourth child.
“I would have six or seven kids if I could. I love having kids. I wish I’d had more when I was younger. Though obviously not with the partners I was with when I was younger.”
This openness in proximity to punchlines is what makes Ryan, who has been based in London since 2008, so compelling a comedian. Both in her stand-up and on television, she has thrived by segueing from material derived from her own relatable experiences to puncturing, occasionally gasp-inducing one-liners. On the Battleaxe tour poster, shades of pink are contrasted by that blunt title.
But if a thread was running through reviews of Missus, her last show, it was that she had softened up: she was still sharp, still acerbic, but more sympathetic, more approachable. What did she make of it?
“I was excited when I saw that, because commissioners and producers and decision-makers had been saying for years, ‘Oh well, we don’t know if Katherine is soft enough or warm enough.’ They want to describe a female performer like a duvet.”
She was happy, though, because she thought maybe now she would “be able to do these mainstream jobs” that had eluded her because she had been deemed too caustic.
“Being the only one allowed to talk with a microphone is a very alpha role, and for a long time we believed that only men can be alpha and that, if a woman is in an alpha role, then that’s off-putting for some reason, or it’s mean or it’s crass.”
The “softer” epithets also coincided with a change in Ryan’s family circumstances. Having mined gold from her life as a single parent to Violet, her now 15-year-old daughter, she reunited with her high-school boyfriend Bobby Kootstra while at home in Canada in 2018, filming the BBC ancestry series Who Do You Think You Are?, and tied the knot with him a year later.
They went on to expand their family with their son, Fred, who is now three, and Ryan became pregnant with their daughter, Fenna, who is two – and has a Dutch name that Ryan’s Irish father mispronounces as Feena – during the Missus tour.
“That show probably was softer because I was just knackered and fatter, so maybe they meant, like, visually softer. I’m really not sure. Yeah, I wonder if marriage and having these kids again has softened me a little bit. I certainly didn’t do it on purpose.”
She smiles, then adds quietly, “But Battleaxe is not a soft show.”
In it she talks about “having these extra children”, Violet’s teenage years, and her power dynamic with Kootstra, while delving into pop culture, gender divides and cheating celebrity men. She also discusses a “controversy I had that came from a Louis Theroux interview, and my perspective on that”.
She is referring to her 2022 interview with Theroux, for the BBC, in which she confirmed she had confronted an unnamed male comic she strongly believed to be a sexual predator “to his face” while working with him on a TV show. She had previously alluded to this on her Prime Video series Backstage with Katherine Ryan.
Although she has never named him, her remarks attracted renewed attention in 2023 after Russell Brand was accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse by four women as part of a joint investigation by the Times, the Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches. Ryan had appeared next to Brand on the 2018 Comedy Central show Roast Battle.
Brand, who strongly denies all of the allegations, was subsequently questioned by police, and it was reported in November 2024 that a file of evidence had been sent to prosecutors to consider bringing charges.
“You can guess who I was talking about, but I never...” she says, trailing off. “It wasn’t about who. And that’s what I thought was so interesting. Everyone fixated on the man again.”
What Ryan had wanted to do was talk about her experience, and the experience of many women she has known “across a spectrum of industries”, who are just trying to navigate their way to feeling safe at work.
“I wasn’t trying to initiate any kind of response. I had just assumed there would never be any response, because it’s gone on so long and everyone has always known.”
It is, for sure, an indictment of the entertainment business that open secrets have this habit of recurring.
“I was certainly shocked to see that anybody even took notice. We didn’t care about this for decades. Why now?”
Perhaps it reflects the fact that Ryan is regarded as a leader in her industry, I suggest, someone people trust and admire.
“Maybe. I think it’s always disarming for people that I just say what I think.”
Indeed, another epithet that gets trotted out about Ryan is that she’s outspoken. A lot of women are called outspoken just for having spoken. How does she feel about that word?
“It’s funny that you point it out, because I’ve probably just become desensitised to this gendered language. Certainly outspoken, yeah. I’ve never heard, like, ‘Jimmy Carr is a very outspoken young man.’ But I am outspoken. I think it’s fair related to me.”
We’re speaking the morning after Ryan’s lively St Valentine’s Day guest spot on The Late Late Show, during which she was recruited to select a winner from a trio of “unromantic” audience tales.
“I love judging people, so that was fun, and I also love a romance dilemma,” she says brightly.
After the interval of Battleaxe, she tries to solve gig-goers’ dilemmas, often love life-related, posting the results on Instagram. With “social media sort of bleeding into comedy and influencers becoming the new TV stars”, she is conscious of the need to “mix it up” and evolve.
“Part of why television is suffering is that there’s very little spontaneity. People know that, and they don’t like being told when to laugh, and they don’t want anything sanitised.”
She says that people are “just more open now” but that her audience feel comfortable telling her intimate details from their lives must surely spring from her own candour too.
“I do have a confessional style, and I have the reality show with the family now, and my podcast” – Telling Everybody Everything – “is transparently me,” she says. “I like telling people secrets, and I like when people tell me secrets.”
She attributes this to being from the “small town” of Sarnia, Ontario, a petrochemicals centre close to the US border – a “random” place from which she jokes about being officially banned. She is not the most famous Sarnia native, which “cuts like a knife”. That would be the astronaut Chris Hadfield, “my arch-enemy”.
When she availed of her Irish passport and moved to London, 17 years ago, she was “a bit lonely”, but authentically spilling about her life was a way “to get English people, especially, to leapfrog the small talk”.
Her father, Finbarr Ryan, was also homesick after he left Cork in 1982, starting an engineering company in Sarnia and marrying her mother, Julie McCarthy (who is descended from Matthew Richey, a Methodist preacher from Co Donegal who emigrated to Canada in 1819). They had three daughters, of whom Ryan is the oldest, before later divorcing.
She wonders if her father moved to Canada knowing he would stay. “Why have I never had this conversation with my dad?”
She messages him to ask. He replies that he had landed-immigrant status, which is permanent, but asked for leave of absence from his job at Cork County Council, in case he wanted to return. As it was, the family visited Cork “all the time”, and in recent years Fred and Fenna have been christened at St Joseph’s Church in Mayfield, on the city’s northside.
She’s unsure if it’s too much of a slur to print, but she has been called a “plastic Paddy” and says she understands why people grow “tired of every American blowing into town in a cowboy hat and being, like, ‘I’m from here.’”
But, despite never receiving invitations to Irish events in London, she is actually Irish as well as Canadian – “those are my citizenships” – and says the “homecoming” of her Late Late debut made her feel “a little bit nervous for the first time in a long time”, in part because she knew her musician great-uncle Eoghan Horgan was watching.
Now when she goes back to Canada (she has become a judge on Canada’s Got Talent) it is more likely to be to Toronto, where she first got into comedy while studying city planning at university and working at the Hooters sports-bar chain, where she gained confidence from compering one of its bikini pageants before trying her luck at a nearby comedy club.
She felt she was “definitely an outsider” in the blokey Canadian scene of the time, but London was “very alternative” and the comedy circuits over here welcomed her, even if they sometimes confused her for American.
“They still do, all the time, which is fine. Soon we’ll be the same country anyway,” she says, deadpan.
From 2012 she was winning regular work on TV panel shows, subverting preconceptions with each gag. People assumed that, as a single mother, she had been rejected, or would have chosen another path, but she was the one who instigated the break-up with Violet’s father. She had been “begging him to leave”, she says, and was proud of her “hypercompetent” parenting.
“I still think that might have been the best decade of my life.”
Ryan drew inspiration from it for The Duchess, the sitcom she wrote and starred in, which in 2020 joined her two stand-up specials on Netflix. But filming the show preceded a difficult year, marked by the pandemic and pregnancy loss.
“The edit was during lockdown, so I wasn’t involved in it, and then I started having miscarriages. It was a nightmare time.”
She still loves the series, but the combative central character, also called Katherine, was “maybe a little bit too angry”, and Ryan wishes she could “go back and tweak little things”, as she can with her stand-up. She also learned that she was very bad at being collaborative.
“I think again, for women, nobody wants to be a bitch, but to be a showrunner you do have to push your ideas and you do have to dictate. I wasn’t able to do that. I was more concerned with being nice than making my vision.”
Women often feel this way, I agree, but I’m surprised she does.
“I do! I’m really nice in real life. Everybody walks all over me. My child walks all over me. In real life I should be a bit more Katherine Ryan.”
For sure, Violet’s capacity for getting her way is on hilarious display in At Home with Katherine Ryan, her U&W channel reality series, which reveals that her eldest child is a bit of a star.
“I love what a brat she is on the show. I think she’s the best of us ... She just really leans into being a bit of a madam, but I like it. I respect it. I think it’s funny.”
Violet, crushingly fascinated by Americana and intent on moving “far away”, also wants “to get into some kind of performance industry”, but once Ryan’s younger two stop being “anonymous babies” she intends to pull them away from the cameras. Kootstra, however, an “isolated” stay-at-home dad with “even less of a filter” than Ryan, loves that people say hello to him now.
“We were never trying to be celebrities. We just felt lonely, and we wanted to know people, and I think the best way to know people is to let them know you.”
That Ryan has always been a hard worker, with too many credits to list, is plain when we talk about the Backstage stand-up series, which was curtailed by one episode in 2021 after Ryan tested positive for Covid.
“I felt a bit sick, but I just thought I was run down from having a baby. ‘Sure, I have a fever and I’m short of breath. It’s probably mastitis: carry on.‘”
She says she “begged them” to let her do the final show, but instead she was bundled away in the middle of the penultimate episode. Like a lot of things that were “peak Covid”, it makes for strange drama now.
Looking back, she thinks it was crazy to tour her Missus show with a baby in tow and another one on the way, though she also wrestles with leaving them at home for Battleaxe.
“If I had some kind of important position, if I was like a cardiologist or something, then I could say ‘Well, the kids will see me doing this successful work, and I’m very important to society.’ But I’m not that important to society,” she says.
“It’s very self-indulgent. I just go out with my tour manager, Annie, who is one of my best friends, and we have loads of fun and I get to meet new people and tell dick jokes all the time. Is that really worth leaving a crying baby? Well, I have decided that it is, yeah.”
The volte-face at the end of this is perfect, but it’s the self-deprecation that leaps out. Isn’t it true that the worse the state of the world, the more essential comedy becomes?
Ryan concedes that it is. “In any time of war or economic crisis or political upheaval, comedy tends to do very well, because comedians remain truth-tellers, but also it’s just silly, and you take your mind off things for a little while,” she says.
“You forget that not everybody is having a laugh all of the time – they’re stressed. And then there’s just this energy shift, and they message you and they’re grateful for it, so, yeah, it’s important. Just not as important as cardiology.”
Katherine Ryan plays University Concert Hall, Limerick, on Thursday, March 27th; Leisureland, Galway, on Friday, March 28th; 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Saturday, March 29th; Waterfront Hall, Belfast, on Sunday, March 30th; and Cork Opera House on Saturday, June 28th
