Comedic powerhouse Katherine Ryan makes a welcome return to the stage this month with ‘Battleaxe’. Our editor, Samantha Harman caught up with her for a good old chinwag about the new live interactive show and balancing family life ahead of her performance.
Tell us about Battleaxe? I feel like it’s my most fun stand-up tour to date, not least because I didn’t have a baby this year! I feel free as I am not bringing the family on the road this time. Also, I don’t have a support act, it’s just me on stage at 8pm because a lot of us are over 40 now and we need to get back home. The themes of the show are feminism, it’s a bit provocative and I talk about my marriage too. I’ve now spent five years in the lab and am ready to share my conclusions about men. The second section of the show is very interactive. During the interval I display my phone number on the projector and then the audience can text me the dilemmas they want to share with the class and that has been amazing for me, getting to know people and how funny they really are.
How do you decide which dilemmas to address? In a panic really. I sit in my dressing room with my tour manager for only 15-minutes and we quickly scroll through them and pick out the ones we think are interesting or funny and then we drag them over to the projector file. Sometimes we get hundreds, some are litigious and we can’t use them. For example a woman said, ‘My husband has been sleeping with the school slapper. How can I get revenge?’ And we thought, ‘Is he going to be in the audience? Are we going to get into a Jeremy Kyle situation?.’ We like to make them as juicy as we can while staying on the right side of wrong. I also like to include some messages from the husbands who have been dragged along. We usually answer between 10 and 12 during each show.
When did you realise that you were funny? I always valued comedy without knowing I was funny. I come from a family with a great sense of humour, humility and irony – that was the language of my household growing up. There was never a moment where I realised I was or wasn’t funny. Being humorous growing up as a woman from a small town in Canada was not valued at that time. I’m from the ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’ generation (Kate Moss, circa 2009) I wanted to be pretty and soft, feminine and uncomplicated and was none of those things, I was very angular looking with crazy orthodontics. I didn’t value being funny from a social standpoint. My friends in my circle certainly thought I was unique and I loved making people laugh, although it wasn’t my main focus as a young woman. My husband was my high school boyfriend then and I recall him laughing and he would tell me I was really funny and that was the first time I saw that quality being valued in a high school romantic setting. I realised then that boys care if you’re funny and what boys think is important during those teenage years.
Tell us about the husband… We had a huge break of 20-years where he married someone else and I dated all of the scum that this country has to offer, one by one I picked them off the street and did a public service to the women of the UK. I distracted your worst candidates and this was before dating apps. My husband and I reconnected when we were 35 after I travelled back to Canada to film ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ and I bumped into him in a pub and we got married nine months later. He is stepfather to my daughter Violet and we have two babies together.
How does Violet feel about your career? She’s outwardly very unimpressed. I don’t think it’s cool to say you admire your mum and think it’s safe to say a lot of things I do will be considered cringe. But then when I produce concert tickets or when she is my plus one to the MTV EMAs or I can facilitate a selfie with Maya Jama, all of a sudden I become really cool. I joke that having a teenage daughter is like giving birth to your high school bully, because she’s very intimidating and beautiful and British and has rich parents. She’s maybe not the sort of girl who would have befriended me in high school. She’s such a good kid and we have a very unique relationship because I was a single mum for a decade and I treat her like an adult in a lot of ways. We have a very special relationship. I loved being a single mother to Violet and now I have a different life with a husband and dad in the house and these small kids but Violet and I only had each other. That’s a once in a lifetime relationship.
You’re such a busy woman, tell us what you do to relax? I won’t be putting a bra or makeup on for any reason on a day off. I’m very glam on stage but if I am not working I like to have really clean skin and a hair mask and I will go anywhere in a tracksuit. With small children a day off is never a day off because you’re up at 6am no matter what and I take them to all their baby classes like gymnastics and to the park. I love doing domestic things like shopping and running errands. Even doing the laundry is fun for me. Go on tour for 100 shows, you’d be dying to do laundry too!
Battleaxe Tour
The Brighton Centre
Friday 28th February
