Page 5 - Katherine Ryan press pack 2015-20

became a single mum when her relationship with Violet’s father ended. “I didn’t even
have a phone when she was born. A poor mum is a good mum,” she deadpans.

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‘I talk about my daughter on stage, but that’s becoming more and more fictional’ …
Ryan doing standup. Photograph: Idil Sukan/Netflix

However, Ryan was also slowly ascending from open mic nights to panel shows such
as 8 Out of 10 Cats and on to her current position as Gen Y’s answer to Joan Rivers.
She’s best known for caustic punchlines verging on the unsayable, and gigs on
programmes like (the fairly mean-spirited) Your Face Or Mine?, where couples have
to decide whether they’re more attractive than one another. In a meta twist, she also
presented the UK reboot of Rivers’ gilded doc series How’d You Get So Rich? Ryan
once quipped that the late comic “got exactly what she wanted from that final surgery
– to stop ageing”.

There are all these jokes about me having plastic surgery but I haven’t
actually had any on my face

Ryan’s own appearance is rarely out of the conversation. “There are all these jokes
about me having plastic surgery but I haven’t actually had any on my face,” she
explains. She has had fillers – though not for a year now. “I think I got a little lost in
the game, I had a bit too much. I was watching The Fix [the US panel show she
appears on with Jimmy Carr]. I saw that my eyebrows were always up and thought,
‘Ooh, yeah, definitely not doing that for a long time!’”

We are snatching an hour at the Ace hotel in London amid Ryan’s busy schedule,
ostensibly to talk about her new Netflix special, Glitter Room, but Ryan is soon giving
her opinion about everything from Cardi B (“She’s just like, yeah I was a stripper – I
love the fact that she’s so open”) to her tiny, “unethical” teacup dogs. She’s got an
animal rights event lined up straight after, and is a big fan of the kind of canines her
mate Danny Dyer describes as “dogs that shiver and piss from their eyes”.

Ryan is warm, lightly cynical, and a bit of a magpie – she marvels at our waitress’s
luminescent makeup, and is herself dressed in a diamanté-studded denim jacket and
black tutu with big, Lady Gaga-esque sunglasses by her side. She is unusually
interested in the harried freelancers hunched over their laptops in the hotel lobby, a
situation she can relate to; as well as the Netflix special – her second, following
2017’s In Trouble – she’s currently writing a sitcom for the streaming service. The