Page 168 - Katherine Ryan press pack

out if the joke was too close to the bone. On the page, via her weekly column in NME,
she wryly dissects politics, celebrity and the links between them, and in her live shows,
she does all of this to ever-growing audiences. The current run of her third live
show, Kathbum, has been extended and extended again due to phenomenal demand.
Since the new year she’s performed Kathbum 23 times (if you don’t count the night she
was on top of a mountain in Austria as part of Altitude comedy festival).

“I say yes to a lot because I’m interested in a lot,” she tells us over the phone, just before
show number 24 in Cambridge. “I just love comedy and I’m so open to watching other
people in comedy. Anything that makes me laugh, I want to watch it, I want to listen to it,
I want to be part of it. But standup is the bones of all of that. It’s important to be doing
live comedy, because comedy is a conversation, and that’s when you get to see people
and meet them and see their towns.”

Ryan's subject matter – pop stars, actors, make-ups and break-ups – has been likened
to that of a women's magazine, and in many ways this is accurate. It's the editorial in
that magazine, and how it treats its material, which makes it absolutely killer. “It’s
important to entertain people and be funny and talk about the news,” she says, “but
somewhere in there I always hope to have an introspective assessment of an important
theme that matters to me.” Take that, Heat.

There is of course an irony in someone who speaks so critically of fame and celebrity
status becoming a regular on all kinds of TV shows, her face more and more familiar to
the viewing public. Is she not concerned about becoming a celebrity herself?

It would seem not: when it comes to fame, “comedians are largely not interested. I don’t
think that we court fame in the same way. Comedians, in my experience, are lovely,
humble people, because even the biggest comedian in the whole world has to go on
stage and risk dying on his ass.”

Anyone who has braved a preview show or a new-material night will recognise this:
comedians old and new all need to preview their new jokes on someone. “It’s like every
time you write new material you become a new comedian,” she observes. “And it takes a
really long time to get to the point where people come to see you on purpose; you have
to slog it out on night buses, being heckled, and for that reason comedians are really
supportive of younger comedians starting out. We’ve all done the same. Actors or
singers, you sometimes have an overnight success story, but with comedians it’s just not
possible.”

Ryan, at this point, is far from new on the comedy scene, or on the shores of the UK.
Having started doing stand-up at uni, she left her native Canada eight years ago and
has been living, gigging and raising her daughter in the UK ever since. The comedy
scene on this side of the Atlantic has been far more welcoming than the one out West.

“When you’re a comedian in Canada you have to travel a whole lot, of course, but you
also have to play a lot of rural towns that are maybe just not interested in alternative
comedy,” she says.

A person on stage telling jokes about celebrities, does that really count as alternative?