S7, Ep 1: Katherine Ryan, comedian and writer

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:44Hi there. Before we start, we wanted to let you know that in this episode, we discuss eating disorders. We have added details in the show notes for organisations who can offer support. hello my lovelies you catch me in my bedroom i'm getting dressed for my next guest she's the first lady of uk comedy i think that you'll see her face more often than king charles i'm telling you probably more often than the pm and i cannot wait i'm standing in my wardrobe i am still i'm not gonna lie i'm at the underwear stage and like most women i have three categories of pants to choose from today. Number one, you have your common and garden briefs.

1:29Now they started a crisp white. They are now grey. Well, actually, they're a little bit green. They are baggy. They've had upwards of about 300 washes. There's a bit of elastic coming out the side here, actually. Number two. Now, I often go down this route, support pants. I want to look my best. Now, these are the pants that go to your knees and up to your belly button. I will look a stone lighter. But by about question three, my eyes are bulging. You only get the truth with me. Now, three. This is what I'm going for today. I class these as sexy. Where are they?

2:14Where are they? There they are. Now these are the pants that you only get out of the drawer when you're feeling lucky. I say wear the pants for the energy that you need to project. And today I'm going to go with number three because who more fitting to channel sexy than the woman, the wonder, the comedy legend? It's Catherine Ryan. This Canadian-born comedian, writer and presenter is best known for a fabulously foul-mouthed comedy. which is delivered in a flurry of glitter, silk and couture sequins. This is the first UK comedian I know who has her own glam squad. Queen of the panel show, Catherine Landed on the UK comedy circuit in 2012.

3:01She's a regular on 8 Out of 10 Cats, Mock the Week, Would I Lie to You and she's got two Netflix comedy specials and a semi-autobiographical comedy drama series, The Duchess. Louis Saru even made a documentary about her. But what I really want to know is she's a busy woman. So what food is fueling all this? Right, I'm ready. Underneath my dress today, I will be a Victoria's Secret supermodel about to go down the runway, hoping that no photographer catches the shoals of cellulite that are shimmering from my bum cheek to behind my knee. look, I can't see it, so it's not there.

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4:38Catherine, Ryan, welcome to Comfort Eating. Thank you so much for having me on. I love eating. I love you. You have been described in the past, it's a savage dish, this, as the Statue of Liberty in drag. It was a member of your family that said this. Who was it? My daughter had the audacity when she leaves the house dressed like a waitress on Epstein Island to say that I look like the Statue of Liberty in drag because I was, I mean, It was sort of a Grecian Gucci embellished blue dress. And it was the look I was going for. That's the thing with us. She meant it as a slam, but I took it as a compliment.

5:22You are actually from across the pond and we think of you as one of our own. So my first question is, which British landmark would you actually like to be compared to? Now, I've got some options. Okay. Multiple choice. Number one, Stonehenge, mysterious and pointless. Two, Angel of the North. Now this, I identify this. This is a hard-faced woman with bingo wings. Oh, she's tough, a bit copper like me, a bit rusty. On number three, Nelson's Column, a marvelous erection that everyone has lingered on. I don't know this Nelson's Column. I don't even know it, but I like the sound of an erection.

6:18Catherine, each week, my guest brings me the snack that silences the rumble in their tummy. It fuels the fire in their belly and it brings their funny bones to life. What have you brought me today? I do not know what is under here, by the way. Go on. It's really simple. Rice and onions. Oh my gosh. Some soy sauce and some butter. it's like a lazy fried rice i love rice and i love the fact that you've used white rice it looks oily it looks buttery is it butter that you put in there the onions have been sweated and they're caramelized and they've slightly stained the rice it's fried rice but it's also like a barbecue with hot dogs and the best bit is the onions Yes, it is that.

7:05I went straight in. I ate it before you did. Oh, no, it is. It's girl dinner. I like everything in one bowl. Yeah. Less washing up. I mean, with, you know, comfort in the title. This snack is just pure comfort to me because sometimes I feel unwell. I don't know what's going on in my life. I've had too much coffee or been running around or I've forgotten to eat. You know when you start to feel nauseous, you're so hungry, hangry, takes on a new form. All I want to eat is something simple. I love spice, but this is not spice. This is not adventurous. It's nothing too fancy or that takes lots of prep.

7:41It just takes your, like that sickness away and you feel pure comfort. This is meant to be a two-way conversation, but I'm just shoving it in my face. Literally, I'm just shoving it. You can't nibble this. No. It has to be, it's like you're kind of feeding a furnace. I choke on rice all the time. it's actually a real hazard for me because i eat rice so quickly and then it forms like a sort of like a brick wall it's all the little rice nuggets whatever they are the little grains grains if you die like that we need to come up with a more glamorous thing to say you died landed on her own stiletto she she had an awful awful experience with uncle ben's yeah i take huge bites of it.

8:25And then I swallow it and I panic because it really gets glued up in my throat. And I've thought maybe I have trouble with swallowing. I don't know, after all my extracurriculars in college, all of a sudden I panic and I run around the kitchen and I can sort of breathe, but not really. And it really hurts. And then I have to just really force it down with loads of water. And it's not a straightforward fix. Like it takes several minutes to really clear. I think a magical person would say that we need to maybe eat slower. I can't. I'm on the move, Grace. You know what it's like. I'm busy. And if it kills me, it kills me.

8:57Yeah. That's how I died. She died being busy.

9:06I've watched your career for 14 years. My hot take is I think that you've made this job bend around you, bend to your will rather than fitting into a mold. And I always wonder with you, did you build this? Did you plan this? Or did at some point, about 2012, I think, did the phone just start ringing one day? Yeah. May 21st, 2012, it started ringing. So you were right. My daughter was about to turn three and I was invited on eight out of 10 cats for the first time. And there's an audition process to get on there. So I was really excited to get on. This is back when that show was, it would make or break you.

9:46I happened to do well. And then I just got really, really busy and I didn't have a plan. I'm not sure if it's a saying that is owed to one comedian or another, but you're only as good as your last gig. I think I was always just in my own lane and that isn't even a gender thing. I think most of my life, I've been a little bit alternative and I'm in competition with myself and I'm not really taking any notice of what other people are doing. Similarly, I don't get jealous of people. I'm not envious of anyone else's career. I don't feel competition with anyone. Honestly. Honestly, that's the key then.

10:24You do so many things on television. And the thing I always wonder when I see you being commissioned and commissioned and commissioned, what is the thing that they won't let you do. I think commissioners have historically struggled to imagine me as being family friendly or open or soft, warm. You know, they like to describe you like a duvet. Yes. And they'll go, I don't know if she's warm enough and cozy and gentle. Give me an example of something that you really want to do and an idea that they just won't let you have. For a while, I thought that either myself or any of my female peers could have a late night chat show in this country.

11:14I think Sarah Millican had one for a little while, not anymore. And I think for whatever reason, women are sometimes relegated to daytime and then the boys do all the late night chat shows. I love to see the format of standing, demanding topical, powerful monologue, comedy monologue, and then sit down and chat. But that's just because it's what I grew up on. And I would love to see it with a really good outfit. So the women, yes, you're meant to be in daytime, but then for daytime, you have to be soft and relatable. These expectations of what softness and femininity mean in an industry where you and I are very alpha.

11:57And I think I've always said it's a misconception to think that stand-up is masculine. Stand-up is just alpha and some women are alpha. And so what does that mean? It sends people into a bit of a tailspin.

12:14You were born and raised in Ontario in Canada. Your mom was Julie, your dad was Finbar, and you lived with your two sisters. Paint me a picture of Ontario home life in the 80s and 90s. For a while, it was actually awesome. So we don't live in part of Canada that you will see on the posters. We haven't got mountains and all this beautiful scenery and bears everywhere. We do have a lot of water. My town is on lakes and rivers. Those lakes and rivers happen to be poison because it's the petrochemical hub of North America. And everyone in the town works for the chemical plant, which my dad has been brainwashed to insist is very safe now.

12:57I have two little sisters who are three and almost six years younger than I am. And I was the leader. I was the boss. I was allowed to bully my sisters into whatever minionhood I saw for them on that day. And we would always eat dinner together. And my dad's Irish, so my mom did a lot of the domestic stuff. There was one terrible time when my dad heard about India. And I think in Ireland, they started eating Indian food. This would have been the early 90s. And we did not eat Indian food in Sarnia, Ontario. It was too far. We hadn't heard of it yet. And he made this rice because we did like rice.

13:37We were a very celiac household. My mom definitely was managing an eating disorder for all of my life. But my dad - Did you know that at the time? You knew she had to eat it? I knew she was weird about eating, but I just, you know, that was the Jane Fonda time. And Jane Fonda is really cool now, by the way. But I think all of our mothers my age, they were 20-year-old girls managing body dysmorphia. And it was just socially acceptable. So tell me about the night that your father decides to deliver Indian food to Canada. Emboldened by news of the East, he cooked rice in orange juice and then chucked a bunch of sultanas in.

14:20And my sisters and I were horrified. I don't remember the meat, but it was, I think we were so big on rice that my dad putting orange juice and sultanas in rice, we just thought was the worst thing that we'd ever had. And then we begged him, just please never again, never. And I love Indian food today. I love that he was grasping around for what the tastes and flavors were. Because, you know, before the internet, before books, You wouldn't know what turmeric was. He doesn't understand. So he's thinking, well, surely it's orange cordial. Yeah, that's what he boiled rice in. I think memories that are connected to food and smells and textures and horrifying events in the kitchen are really written on the canvas of who you are.

15:04I have this idea of you all just kind of sitting around the table. Did adults smoke then, didn't they? They did. And in the evenings, my mom's family in particular drank and smoked loads and lived locally, whereas my dad's family lived in Ireland, so we never saw them. We'd have to gather around a speakerphone once every three months to make a very expensive call to chat to them. It was my mom's family who were drinkers, but they were funny and they were chatty. Everyone always told me the truth and everyone treated me like an adult and included me in conversation. Yeah. Do you think that's when you first realized the currency of funny?

15:41There was never a time without the currency of funny. It was always funny. I think probably before I could speak, I noticed people being funny or I'd get attention for performing or I'd get out of trouble. It was just so woven into everyday life. There are a quarter of a million lakes in Ontario. So I need to talk to you about water sports. Okay. I'm picturing a steady theme of worn kayaking. I did that with boyfriends. I'll go back to my list. Paddle boarding. They paddleboard now in my town, but I wasn't doing that. I swam. Well, the third thing on my list was actually skinny dipping. I did some of that.

16:22What is your advice for that? For getting from the taking the clothes off to the last six meters before you get into one of the quarter of a million lakes? I think when you're very young, you don't care and you can just run around naked and get in the water. So there was a lot of that. And then there's a time where you're super shy. And then by the time I was skinny dipping again, I just would have been pissed. Being in a lake intoxicated full stop is so dangerous. We would jump off under the bridge. And under the bridge, there's a current in this really fast river. And you get chips under the bridge.

16:58And you sit there and you look at the scenery. But at night, we'd go and jump into this river, which would whisk you down to almost the other side of town. And you could die. We did that. drunk. We would do loads of really terrible things. We drank so much, so young, that by the time I was 19, I was just very serious about university. I was like, yeah, we got away with a lot. Your granny lived in Ireland. So there's these points where the Ryans all go to Ireland. Tell me about that. Well, we went many times when I was young. It's really expensive to travel as a family of five. It was Ireland and it was always such a letdown because it was damp and it was cold.

17:39My poor mom got a real crash course in what it was, I think, to be a traditional Irish wife because she was this sassy, sexy, little blonde Canadian outspoken dish. And my dad was like the only man not from my town. And he was really tall, dark, and handsome. He was like six foot six. He was funny. And then she went back to Ireland with him. I think for the first time, either just before the wedding, she was pregnant with me, just had a terrible time and kept going back and having terrible times. She had these three small kids. My sister got the chickenpox on the flight over and for the first week, I got it the middle week and my baby sister got the flight back.

18:17And that was all my mom's responsibility to deal with, obviously. And my dad's there like eating tripe and drachine. Tell me about the tripe because I mean, I'm glad that you got to experience that. I'm glad that I did not. I mean, I experienced it from afar, but I would watch it cookie, I noticed my Nana boiled a lot, boiled ham, boiled potatoes, very little flavor going on and boiled this weird, like it looks like crumpets, but it's long. Like it's got all these holes in it. And it stinks. And I just remember thinking, I'm so ethnic.

19:00my first job i always felt was quite public it was as um i was a teenager and it was at wh smith's in carlisle um and it meant it was like in the 80s and every single person came in and saw you they all bought their enemies their magazines oh yeah but your first job was even more out there your first job was hooters and it is so completely the opposite to what we ever heard british female comedians do um what drew you to that job i wanted to be nice. I wanted to be one of these girls that had an easy life. And all of my research led me to believe that the best thing you could be was pretty and sweet and subservient.

19:50And Hooters in this country has a bit of a reputation for being like a topless bar or something to do with sex work. But in Canada, in North America, it's certainly more like being a cheerleader. And you're not engaging in sexually explicit conversations, but you are conversing and being friendly and you're hula hooping. And we did car washes and pageants, bikini pageants, and we got to do golf caddying. And I think I was attracted to all of that. But what I found was this matriarchy of really like-minded, cool women who were like kind of the prettiest girl in their small town of not that pretty girls.

20:30You know what I mean? And then they went to the big city and they're like, I'm going to work at Hooters and be a star. And we were all frustrated performers, but these girls had so much more than that. And I'm actually still friends with most of them today. And they've all gone on to be very interesting. Can you still hula hoop? Of course I can. Forever, for an endless amount of time. I could just hula hoop until I get tired and need to lie down. Do you get tips? I was making$1 ,000 a day sometimes. I was the richest university student. I had no student loans, but not everyone will make$1 ,000 a day at Hooters.

21:03I was definitely a star and it wasn't because I was the prettiest. And that was an interesting lesson to me. I wasn't at all the prettiest. And I was Miss Hooters Toronto as an A cup. So none of that mattered. I was like, oh, isn't that funny that all of these virtues that I thought I needed, loads of girls around me have them in spades, but I'm a hustler. I'm really smart. I can chat the right chat. I can manipulate situations to my advantage with these men. um i can take loads of tables and multitask and i'm a good waitress on top of it well i i should have i should have mentioned this earlier hooters actually is quite the restaurant isn't it it's great what's on the menu mostly buffalo chicken so it'll be wings and we have loads of girls would use the menu in their pageant answer and try to be sexy um breaded wings or just wings and then unbreaded wings, like grilled, you know, without the – those are naked.

22:02So we'd say, if you could be anything on the menu, what would you be? And girls would be like, I would be hot, naked, extra saucy wings. And then when I hosted the bikini pageant, I wanted the girls who were the hardest workers and the most collaborative to shine. So I'd be like, Krista, where do we keep the bin bags? And they'd be like, and I'd be like, that's right. you don't know because you're never getting your elbows in there and like changing the bins. I'm really interested in the food that's there because you have to wear this tiny uniforms, tiny skirts. You've got, you know, crop tops, but the menu is deep fried things.

22:42Are you actually snuffling these popcorn chicken leftovers when they go back backstage? I'm calling it. All the girls that I worked with had certain criteria for eating leftovers. We all ate leftovers, but it was mostly wings. You could see what was untouched and we'd call it dirty. We'd be like dirty wings in the back or like dirty fries. Like if it was dirty, it had been to a table and come back. But if like a nice group of ladies had wings and they didn't finish them and a bunch were to the side, I'd absolutely eat those. I would bring home a takeaway thing of all my dirts. We'd shorten it to dirts, dirts in the back.

23:15Or if the girl, it's so weird, but it would depend a lot on what the customer looked like. there you go if their hygiene was on point i would take a bite out of their wing this is it i've come in and i've ordered some food i'd eat your i'd drink your soup no problem what if i was visibly itching then maybe not

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24:28You have never been shy about talking about your desire for bigger boobs. Yeah. Tell me about your efforts as a young girl to amplify them. So it's funny because when I was younger, all I wanted were these big porno breastfeeding tits. from like 13, from much too young. I knew what plastic surgery was. And when I was 21, I got them. And it was the greatest day of my life. Before the boob job, did you used to put things in your bra? Yes, I did. Of course I did, Grace. I think a visible nipple, like an erect nipple, is really aesthetically pleasing. It drives men mental. Wild, because they can see that you're a mammal.

25:07If you cut off the ends of a lemon, just the end, and you put the lemon rind in your bra, that makes a really convincing nipple. If you've got a lemon, I'll do it now. So the best convincing breast that I got was I started using water balloons, but water was kind of too heavy. It wasn't the right texture. And then we saw in a movie that girls were using custard and pudding, rice pudding. We experimented with a lot of that. And so custard turned out to be the best. Custard with a little lemon bum on the end. Makes a great boom. It feels like certainly in Britain, we have collectively opened up about surgery and tweakments.