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Twenty minutes into her first stand-up special, Katherine Ryan declares, from her place onstage at the Hammersmith Apollo in London, circa mid-2016, that when her special Katherine Ryan: In Trouble debuted Valentine’s Day on Netflix: “We either have a female president, or we’re in the middle of a world war.”
Not yet on both counts.
But close still counts in horseshoes and thermonuclear war, right?
Ryan did accurately predict that Americans would vote for Donald Trump, joking “I think that’s the president America deserves,” earning big cheers from her British audience. And Ryan, a Canadian expat in the U.K. for close to a decade now, also found real life catching up to her satirical punchline that it wouldn’t be easy for any Americans looking to relocate north of our border. “Donald Trump has made refugees of his own people, by hating refugees,” she quips.
Fast-forward to here and now.
Migrants and refugees have smuggled themselves north into Canada. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Trump, and their handshake, Ivanka’s gaze, and Sean Spicer calling Trudeau “Joe” all begat memes, just in time for Ryan’s arrival in America on our Netflix and TV screens (she’s made her Conan debut Wednesday night).
Ryan, 33, not only has become familiar to British TV viewers through regular appearances on chat shows, but also found a following among teen girls, which she plays up in the first few minutes of her hour. She makes cracks about how to defy aging by shrinking your body and your voice to turn into a slightly bigger baby. She enjoys making fun of her propensity for falling in love with the awful men she dates, while also snarking about the double standards for women in relationships.
After one such bit, she observes reflexively: “It’s sad, because I think I’m a very nice girl but my comedy has been described as kind of nasty. They say I’m Joan Rivers but older, and that hurts.”
Then firing zingers at the late Rivers for how she died, then immediately after at Bill Cosby for committing his rapes back in “the good old days…when it was frowned upon.” How do we spot the next Cosby? Ryan has a blunt, straightforward solution. Followed by a lewd act-out of the only people and ways she’d allow someone to rape her.
Yes, Ryan comes out of the contemporary Sarah Silverman school of raunchy meets cheeky comedy, which seemed to have influenced more than a few young women in American stand-up comedy much more so a decade ago than now. Of course, too, Ryan’s titters are coming to us from across the pond, and she’s only the second U.K.-based comedian granted an official Netflix special (after Jimmy Carr last year).
She even restarts her set midway through, reintroducing herself to the audience as “TV’s Katherine Ryan,” and going back to her Canadian roots – mostly to roast her hometown as a horrible wasteland, literally and figuratively. But her younger sister still lives there, and Katherine must go back for her sister’s wedding and deliver an appropriate toast.
As a single mother herself, Ryan jokes about her daughter’s naïveté concerning their dead rabbit, as well as how motherhood has given her newfound confidence and ammunition when dating the “pirates” and jerks she does still. Ryan employs a few minutes of crowd work in the beginning of her set which allows her to incorporate those audience members into her stories as a running dialogue that keeps more people invested in them. Even if her stories also don’t paint the prettiest picture of herself.
“Look. I’m a prick. I’m a terrible, terrible prick!” Ryan declares near the end. Then again, that attitude also has gotten her much acclaim, too. “God bless the British panel shows. They’re the reason I eat.”
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.
