‘I was lucky I was hated in high school!’ - 5 Things We Learned About Katherine Ryan

Sharp, caustic and shrill – three words that have been used to describe comedian Katherine Ryan.

But those comments don’t faze her, nor should they, says interviewer Emma Barnett: “She’s one of the most successful, ruthlessly observant, and strategically glamorous comedians commanding stages today”.

Katherine’s journey has been remarkable: from a single mum living on the poverty line after moving to the UK from Canada in 2007, to a household name.

Speaking with Emma Barnett on her Ready to Talk podcast, Katherine opens up about the power of being disliked, making money, and her relationships with men. Here are a few things we learned from that conversation.

Please note: In this article Katherine speaks about her experience of abusive relationships. For details of organisations that can offer help and support please visit bbc.co.uk/actionline.

Katherine moved to the UK as a single mum, but her love life now looks very different.

She married her teenage sweetheart just eight months after a chance reunion - and together they have welcomed three more children in the past four years.

But she still has that need to earn and returns to work within minutes as soon as the phone goes off.

She spoke to Emma just two and a half weeks after giving birth to baby number four – as Emma puts it, ‘in all her postnatal glory’.
“I feel great,” Katherine says, sharing her positive birth experience.

“I've learned speaking about my experience that you're not allowed to celebrate a really quick and seamless birth because it makes other people feel bad if they nearly died and had an emergency c-section, and that's not my intention at all.

“We're all a whisper away from death when we choose to have children.”

Katherine is happy to talk openly about her wealth, and her ambitions around money.

It’s an openness fostered by her experiences of life on the poverty line, before her comedy career.

“It was awful, I would run out of money at the end of every month. I was working full time… looking in the sofa for change to be able to get the bus to work.

“I would bring a big box of Rice Krispies cereal to the office because milk was free at the office - I would just eat cereal all day.
At the time, Katherine was a single mum, working in an office in Holborn.

“I was working so hard and just keeping my head above water,” she says.

Now, Katherine says she is successful beyond her “wildest dreams”

“I talk about wealth for her: that woman who was 25 with a new baby in a foreign country, 3,000 miles away from anyone who loved me – on the poverty line.

“I’d love to say to her, ‘You got rich!’”

Katherine is also fiercely proud to pay taxes.

“I don't really know how much I earn; I know how much tax I pay,” she says, “And I'm paying like hundreds of thousands of pounds in tax quarterly.

“I follow all the rules and I pay loads of tax and I feel like it's a privilege to pay tax.”

Katherine says the “shame” of leaving her daughter’s father put her in a place of vulnerability”, resulting in some “really dangerous relationships”.

“I never thought that I had the right to get away from those men, that I should get out of those relationships,” she said.

“I tolerated so much what I would define now as abuse, which I didn't define as abuse back then.”

Katherine says she is often “criticised” for the way she talks about men and male violence, but her experiences have made her “afraid of men”.

“I think I speak about men in a way that is criticised a lot,” Katherine says, “With facts and figures… about how not all men are killers, but all killers are men.”

Katherine realised she needed to “reframe” her brain to find a partner “who wasn't an aggressor of some kind, who wasn't exploitative, who didn't hate [her] for any crumb of success”.

“The only way I met my husband is through my own mental reframing of like, oh, what you seek, you shall find,” she says.

“So if you have decided that men are this way, it's no wonder that you keep dating men who are this way… it's a confirmation bias.”

Katherine says people who really “know” her like her, but she gave up “early” on being liked by everyone.

“I was never super likeable,” Katherine says. “I was aware, really young, that I was not ordinary.

“The way I interacted with people was jarring, sometimes was unlikeable, was different – I would say the wrong thing.”

For a while, she “aspired to be” like women who were “uncomplicated and soft,” doing jobs at Hooters and entering bikini pageants – but she would always “slip up”.

Katherine’s mother shared some words of wisdom which changed her perspective on everything.

“My mother said, ‘those girls aren’t normal. They’re ordinary… you’re extraordinary. You’re going to be disliked sometimes… and you should lean into that. And then I started doing comedy.”

Katherine’s “thick skin about criticism” helped her when tackling tricky audiences – in one such instance, the compere was “apologising to the audience” for bringing a woman onstage.

Emma asks if Katherine has any advice for other young women who are worried about being liked.

“If I were frozen with worry about what people thought, I wouldn’t have had the experiences that I’ve had,” Katherine says.

“Why let an imaginary judgement of you… stand in the way? You’d be wasting your life.”

“I’m lucky that I was so hated in high school!”

Katherine, as always, still talks “unapologetically” about sex, body image, and pop culture in her comedy.

But given how different her life now looks, she says she has been “forced to consider” what her onstage persona is today.

“I was a single mom come good, I was able to claw success out of my situation and that was interesting people,” she says.

“Now I’m married, and not only am I married, I’m basically a trad wife!”

She noticed one review which described her as “softer”.

“It's bad for the brand, all of it! I'm softer physically, emotionally...” she laughs.

But Katherine has simply diverted her attention to different things – whilst there is “less television,” she is still touring and has her own podcast.

“I think people who followed me before are seeing still the same version of me,” she says, “Just woven into the new version of what I am now.”