Page 219 - Katherine Ryan press pack

Looking back, do you think you needed to leave Canada to make it in your

career?

I happen to vibe really well with British sense of humour, but they also appreciate

my North American perspective. My dad’s Irish so I was visiting Ireland a lot as a

kid, so it’s not totally foreign to me. I know a lot of really talented Canadian

comedians but the country, in my experience–I don’t know, I haven’t gigged in

Canada, apart from Just For Laughs, in many years–but it must be really, really,
really difficult to be a touring comedian in Canada because it’s so cold so for much

of the year and it’s so big. You have to travel quite a distance in between clubs. I

think they just do not have the saturation that the U.K. does. The U.K. is this really

small collection of islands that have a bunch of clubs and you can do three to four

clubs in one night. And in Canada, the really talented comedians I know, they’re
working and they have to go all the way to Edmonton, and then they have to go all

the way to Calgary, and then they have to go all the way in B.C. But things are

changing all the time. Schitt’s Creek is this amazing show that everybody in the

world knows about that’s Canadian, written and produced in Canada. And I hope

to see more original Canadian content in the very near future because we’re
absolutely capable of it.

I always think of the 2007 Christopher Hitchens essay in Vanity Fair in which

he argues that women can’t be funny. Is that a battle that female comics still

come up against?

It’s been said–and I forget by whom, but I love the saying–that there are certain

men who think women aren’t funny and that’s because funny women don’t talk to

them. And you know the kind of man I mean. And he says he’s never met any

funny women and that’s because you’re basically harassing women in the club and

so women choose not to talk to you. So I know that that attitude exists and it’s not

just men perpetuating it. I mean, it does take time to shake a generational attitude.
Women are taught that men lead, a man should text you first, a man should make