YouSaid · the spoken record

Katherine Ryan

lines on the record: 48
first: 2023-09-05
most recent: 2023-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“About that, really sad that I invited that energy into all of our lives. But now I think, oh, do you know what? That person actually Indirectly taught me how to stand up for myself quite a lot, and I got out of that and I'm not there anymore and I'm a stronger person because of that. Every failure has a lesson and you always come out of suffering better than you went in. True”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just forget about, and I just think I believe in attracting positive energy to yourself. I say you don't call the demons into the room. Whatever you think, I believe you will move closer to. So if you think you're going to fail all the time and if you think about someone who hurt you or if you think about the mistakes that you've made, that will live rent free in your mind. It will take up space and it will make you sick. And then if you just move forward and think about the lovely things and if you have gratitude and you're really actively grateful for the things that you have, then more things will come to you. And it's really what I believe. I just never, I'm grateful for my biggest mistakes because I was with someone for a while that was quite a bully. I don't want to throw around the word abusive, but there are different types of abuse. And sometimes I get really shame.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like it. I like rejection and failure a lot. Now I really love it because I have developed the spirituality where I truly believe if you don't get something, then you weren't meant to get it. And I don't feel that I'm competing with other comedians or certainly not with other female comedians. I think there are enough opportunities to go around. Luckily, my professional life has been mostly wins and very few losses touch wood. Though there have been setbacks and there are jobs I want that I don't get and that's fine with me. And it stings a little bit at first, but then you just have to be resilient and move on because again, it's not the most important thing in the world if I don't get a job that I want. But my personal life has been fraught with mistakes that I have made and pain that I have caused people or pain that has been inflicted upon me or problems that I've had to find resolutions to or rise above or just.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why, I'm a British comedian, whether you like it or not, I developed here, I'm very lucky to have developed here because I started comedy in Canada but only got to do just a little bit. And I am now banned from the comedy club where I started because I broke up with someone who was friends with the owner and he sent me a text. I asked, oh, I'm back in Canada, could I do some stand up there? And he said, I'm sorry, I made a promise to an old friend. When you broke up with him, I would never book you again. I was like, Oh, patriarchy what? Anyway, I've done very well since then, so I'm not a Canadian comedian. I just did a few gigs there. I am a Canadian person with a lot of American cultural influences as far as television and music, you know, that whole pop culture is concerned, but all of my comedy career has been in London and British and Scottish.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had But now, if we watch the Netflix special about her life, her story is very complex and we learn kind of why she identified with that part of her family. But anyway, yeah, and I'm certainly not trying to, what's the word, misappropriation? Yeah, I'm not trying to do that. It was the fact that when I was little. Yeah, I saw it. I saw that Beyonce's sexuality came from a place of not victimhood but of alpha power.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes when I used to say, oh, all I wanted to be Gramp was a strong, powerful, beautiful black woman, you know, that to some people came off a little Rachel Dolazal. They were like, well, why are you trying to...”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Major feminist challenge. Of course, he was. But no, I don't really worry about it because I think as far as authenticity is concerned, I don't second guess that much if I'm understood or misunderstood. I just try again to like move forward and be as sincere as I can and run the risk that I might be, you know, misinterpreted.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the You genuinely feel this way. Oh, that's true because there's such a lot of virtue signaling now, and you actually see it with the men. And I know a lot of them are feminists and they're really trying to make the world a better place. But I also say, I mean, sometimes you look at these guys and you go, for every speech about social justice at another chaperone, like some of them are the worst ones. We got to treat women nicely. They turn out to be the creepiest ones.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be intersectional is a risk because I never want to appear to be explaining something to women of color or different ethnicities me as a white woman who basically looks like Taylor Swift's mom. Like I could not look more right wing. I really look like one of the moms for Kavanaugh, Orange County, real housewives of, you know, I get that that's what I look like. And I would hate to be misunderstood or to have that misconstrued and to have it look, you know, to the black women that I'm trying to advocate for in that joke to think that I'm attacking them or that I'm making light of any situation. You know, it is kind of risky, but I don't mind taking those risks because I think you just have to stick your neck out sometimes.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happy and healthy and safe and well, and from then on, and I don't think everyone needs to be a mother. You don't all need to have kids. But for me, becoming a parent was a true revelation in what really matters. And it sounds silly, but that beacon, that one true gratitude, that one true thing if my daughter's always happy and healthy and safe, then all the other stuff doesn't bother me. I don't mind if I'm. shouted over and I don't mind this.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that's very kind of you to say. I don't know that that's always true, and sometimes I look quite dodgy on those shows as well if I've consumed gluten that week. You know, you never know what you're going to look like. Some days I get too much Botox. I go overboard. I've looked back and gone, whoa, slow down on that, Catherine. People very rightly tweet me and go, Your lips are too big this week, true. Guilty. But I think that is all unintentional. I think I've always just been pretty resilient, and I know that if I do a bad job, nobody dies. My success or failure on any given panel show doesn't really matter in the long term. And on that first date of ten cats, when everything in my life was so desperate, so chaotic, at that time I found very simple gratitude. I thought, well, I don't have any shoes on, you know, like my dad growing up in Cork. But my daughter is happy.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Persist with my authentic voice. And I had a unique take on things that for whatever reason really worked on the night. And it could have gone very badly, but it went well. And I talked about things like football in my own way. So I don't know the players, but I know their wives. I can't like do the jokes back now and make them funny. But for whatever reason, authenticity saved the day that day.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Frugal, very clever that way. And I sat in my dressing room and I went, oh my goodness, look who's on the show. Jimmy Carr, who I looked up to tremendously, but I had never really met. Sean Locke, John Richardson, Hannibal Barrasse was on the show, the American comedian who very infamously initiated the ultimate takedown of a mister Bill Cosby with his stand up and I was very nervous, and I thought well I can't do their job better than they do, so I'm just going to have to do my own thing. I have no choice. I'm never going to be able to do an impression of any of these men better than they can be themselves. I have no choice but to come at this from the most unique angle that I can, and that is just my own voice. And so on eight out of ten cats, we talk about politics and current events. At the time, unfortunately, I think some football thing was happening. I never know what's going on there. But I just decided”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there was an aha moment, if you can have one, and it is a series of baby steps and small losses and victories, of course, but in may twenty twelve I got to do eight out of ten cats in the UK for the first time. My daughter was nearly three years old. She'd be three the following month. And I was pretty recently split from her dad. And I was with a partner that, I mean, I'm glad I'm not with. Now it was just a very vulnerable time where I was making a lot of people unhappy and I was making a lot of mistakes and I was behaving in a way that was very reckless and just trying to look after my daughter. And then when I got that opportunity, I had so little money that I got a dress like a little yellow dress from Zara, but I couldn't get any shoes, so I wore wellies because I figured, oh, they'll be behind the desk anyway. So I wore my brown wellies. I was very...”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To figure out what I loved about Sarah Silverman, but I was not emulating it properly and I would talk about, oh gosh, like abuse, just awful things. And I was offensive without being funny at all. But that was a learning curve that I had to go through because people would say the more someone says you are this, you are that. You're like Joan Rivers. You're like that. Then you say, oh, if you're impressionable and you still don't have confidence, you say, am I? Oh, okay, well, I'll do more of that then. And it was the men would always say, you should be more edgy. You know, it's great when you're dirty. You should be so dirty. You're less dirty girl. Oh, am I? I'd had two boyfriends in my life. I was like, okay, well, I'm that then, and I listened to a lot of unsolicited advice, which I'm sure you get as well.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, no one recognized me, my girlfriends at Hooters would say to me, You should go, you should do stamp comedy, you should do the amateur nights. And those women I'm still in touch with, you wouldn't believe they live all over the world. They do tremendous things. One of them has a tattoo studio. One of them is a doctor. One of them is a trump supporter who goes to all the rallies and is like, you know, very pro guns and this and that. They're all very, very different characters doing amazing things. But they were so supportive and encouraging and they would come see my gigs. And a lot of times I would just die. I would talk about horrible things. I thought I liked edgy comedy. I liked Sarah Silverman, but I wasn't sophisticated enough to understand what edgy comedy was. So a lot of times I would talk about sex or I would talk about race or I would just try.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would be 2006, 2007 when I started. My version of dressing up is to be very glamorous. I like that kind of thing. I like hair. I like makeup. I like beautiful fashion. I like shoes. Again it's this whole conversation about feminism. Can you be this kind of feminist or that kind of feminist? Can you care about eyelashes and getting your makeup done and also be a feminist? Of course you can. We know that now, but it really took a few strange looks and weird gigs. They were right. Sometimes when you dress that way, it is distracting. People did not take you as seriously as a comedian if you looked too glamorous. It was a balance, I had to say, well, I don't want to alienate this group, and I should be really self-deprecating. Or maybe I should say that I'm a slut. I'm really promiscuous because that's funny to people. Or maybe I should say, oh, I can't find a man. That's funny to people. You do want to please the audience. And unfortunately, a lot of your audience come in with an unconscious bias. When you're an open mic, you don't have the luxury and the privilege that I enjoy now where I can say almost anything with confidence because people have for the most”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you begin stand up comedy, as far as I remember, it might have changed now because I'm speaking about an industry now. I'm a dozen years out from when I started doing open mics. People would tell me then you can't dress up, you don't want to look distracting, you have to wear a hoodie and jeans. Women we were told to be invisible. If you want to do this man's job, try to make it not so obvious that you are a lady.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is okay to club seals in Canada more than okay. It is actually racist to imply that one shouldn't club seals because it is an indigenous or Inuit pastime. And they do eat seal meat and they aren't any better or worse than people who eat chickens. This is what I do. I don't just cross the line. I long jump over the line somehow. I didn't mean to, but I very innocently get myself into trouble quite a lot. And I think a lot of comedians start out trying to be edgy. They like edgy comedy or they just don't know any better and they end up being quite offensive. And now at least I've learned, you know, I've honed my craft a little bit. I think I'm less offensive now.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would do the heck out of the chalkboard. I would make it so artistic. I would make it so beautiful. And we had club sandwiches on offer one lunchtime. And they said Catherine Glosside write club sandwiches. So I wrote Club sandwiches not seals, and I drew this Arctic landscape with some seals. I was just trying to be funny. Sometimes I would write things like because our patio was up on the roof. I'd write, don't be a fatio, climb to the patio, stuff like that.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but that is what a cheerleader is. That is what a lot of roles in society are, whether we make it so overt, but also I was eighteen nineteen, twenty years old. I wanted to be Brittany Spears. I didn't know any better.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, they're probably right. I don't think Hooters was designed to be feminist. It was created in 1983 in Clearwater, Florida. It was six businessmen, the original six. One of their secretaries used to run on her lunch hour, and that's what one would wear to run an exercise in the 80s, like slouch socks and trainers, little orange shorts and a white vest. And the men just said that's what's sexy, just a girl next door with very little makeup on, sports on TV, beer, chicken wings. Yeah, it was certainly, I mean, no, it isn't feminist. Of course not.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was. So the questions before I came along would have been if you could be anything on the menu, what would you be and why? And the girls would say I'd be hot naked spicy wings because I'm saucy and delicious or whatever. So I would make sure that the most effective servers and the girls who chipped in the most and got their hands dirty, I made sure that they came out winners of the pageant so I'd ask questions like Jessica, where do we keep the bin bags? And some of the girls didn't know. And I'd be like, oh, it seems you've never taken out the bins. Well, Jessica, everybody, you know, I asked loads of questions. I would ask some political questions. I would ask like just, I wanted everyone to feel included into make it fun, but also I wanted the hardest working women to shine.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And I don't know what gave me the courage to ask. I just wanted to do it. I said, How about you let me present it? And he said, yes, for whatever reason. And that was a real pivotal moment for me. I got to put on a glamorous dress and hold the microphone and compare really. It was stand-up comedy.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, Banter was absolutely a key thing at Hooters to be able to get on with someone in chat, not in a sexual way. I think in Britain, people don't really understand what Hooters is about. It's not a strip club. You're not meant to chat to them in a sexual way. You're just meant to be accommodating and nice and friendly and laugh at their jokes. If you're entertaining, then people would come back and see you again and it would give this vibrant restaurant vibe if you had interesting girls there. I mean, I just really liked it. And then we had bikini pageants. I did the bikini pageant once and I was Miss Hooters Toronto. And I got to travel around and do more bikini pageants in Florida. And I knew that wasn't for me. But then the following year, I asked the manager if I could present the bikini pageant instead of this man that we got to do it in a bow tie.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Woman, the type of girl that I thought I could learn to be, but I learned the very opposite at Hooters, Hooters like the Golden Girls, is a matriarchy. It's loads of young women working together, the managers who are mostly men, though there were some female managers. They just hide from us in the office. And it is the women and the smartest, most layered, multitasking women who do well at Hooters and who can collaborate and cooperate. The girls that came in there, who just looked like supermodels, they didn't last very long. Now there are beautiful women who are extremely effective as well, but the girls that didn't have layers and didn't have anything other than what they looked like on the outside, they just didn't like it there.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started working at Hooters by accident, everything that's happened to me has been by accident. I had a job at a bar called Originals, and I was walking in the heat. It was September I had just moved to Toronto. I was walking and I was wearing black as a lot of waitstaff do, and I couldn't find because it was my first time in a big city, I couldn't find originals. I was walking around, I was getting really hot. I get super upset if I'm hot because I'm terribly Irish, skinned, almost ginger. I can't be in the sun. And then I saw like a beacon of light, this branding. I saw Hooters, and I knew what Hooters was, and I said to myself, well, if I worked at Hooters, I'd be at work by now. And instead of going to originals, I popped into Hooters and I asked if I could have a job. And of course, I had skin colored hair and hair colored skin at the time, very blonde, eighteen years old, exactly what they're looking for, and they gave me a job right on the spot. And I liked it because again, it was that archetype, this friendly, submissive, cheerleader.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I here's my logic. I nearly finished, and I was always really academic before I decided not to be. I was one of those kids that would just show up and write the exam, but that doesn't fly so much in university, and I would take on extra shifts at Hooters, the bar and restaurant where I worked, because I would say to myself, well, I don't get paid to be at school, but I get paid to be at Hooters, so I'm not going to go to school. I'll just work at Hooters and then show up and write the exams. And that worked for about three years. But in my final year, I just wasn't finishing the type of submissions that were necessary to graduate. It's a shame.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My plan, well, I didn't want to be a city planner necessarily, though I did find that it was a very practical thing to study and I learned a lot. I still know a lot about why the hospital's over there and different types of sewers. And, you know, it was cool. But I just knew that I needed to be in a metropolis and this school Ryerson University was in the middle of Toronto. It was not suburban. It was right near much music, which was our MTV. At the time, and I knew that that's where I needed to live and I thought, well, how can I live right there and be in the middle of a city? And then planning was just a program that not many people applied for. And I got in. I didn't get in. I actually also applied for journalism and radio and television arts, but that's super competitive at Ryerson, so I didn't get in.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, well I hate to put Specificity on to anyone, but the women that I know who are comedians who grew up little girls was not a tool for making friends. It made us. Quite ostracized. It made us stand out as being different. It wasn't cool. It's still the same. They'll say in dating surveys now for heterosexual people, what do you look for? A sense of humor. But to a man, that means a woman who laughs at him. And to a woman, that means a man who makes her laugh? Certainly when I was growing up being funny, didn't make me cool anywhere outside my house. I didn't think I'd be a comedian. I certainly didn't for a very long time. It just happened by accident.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Job that I have now, though it's not certainly a prerequisite. Loads of comedians that I know expect everyone to like them and they get wounded if people don't. So I'm very lucky. I think that that quality would serve anyone well in any industry.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean I was always pretty confident even when I was bullied. I mean I use the word bullied. I don't know what it was, you know, people didn't like me and they let me know it. A group of girls made a newspaper about my friends and me and they put me on the cover next to a photo of a camel and they were like, oh, look, thank God for makeup. Just making fun of the way I looked and then making fun of our dance group, things like that. All my other girlfriends cried, floods of tears hauled into the principal's office, and I wasn't sad. I was like, look at this, we're famous. They love us. They're obsessed with us. They made a newspaper about us. We're so famous. I was always very comfortable with the idea that you just had to move forward. Sometimes you have to move forward just to stand still, do what you want to do, and there will always be people who don't like it. I was always okay with that. I never expected in a million years that everyone would like me. So that is, I mean, a very important foundation for the”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I still haven't really realized it. I still think I might be a cheerleader. It's so interesting, the conscious message that you give to your children versus the culture that you create for them in your home. So while my mother was overtly saying consciously being funny is cool, you can be a comedian. You could do this unconventional job for a young woman. Certainly it would have been in the 90s when she was saying it. But I still saw, you know, my mother, it meant a lot to her that she looked pretty. I see her get punished for saying something that was disruptive or not behaving the way that she was expected to behave at a Christmas party. Someone conscious and some very conscious messages. So I knew, I knew that you'd have an easier life if you were pretty and quiet.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she would The time, so you'll do that. You could do that. Or Saturday Night Live, she wanted me to be on the satirical American show Saturday Night Live. And I said, oh, this woman is crazy. I'm going to be a beautiful, quiet, calm wife when I grow up. I'm not going to be disruptive. I'm going to be pretty and I'm going to be quiet. I thought I'd be a cheerleader or something.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my mum and I would watch David Letterman show late night stand up, really, and films with Middler and Sher and those types of Barbara Streizan my mother loved these disruptive women, I suppose, Joan Rivers and all of that. And of course the Golden Girls, we would watch that. We'd watch Roseanne. And my mom would say you could do that. You could do what David Letterman does. And I just thought so.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I think the first time I made a group of adults laugh is when Michael Jackson sang with the child of a soldier in the Gulf War at maybe the Super Bowl. And the little boy sang, did you ever know that you're my hero? But he sang it in a way that I mean it's very unfair now, but I sort of made fun of. And I would sing that for the family, but like the little boy, he sort of sang it like this. Did you ever know that you're my he or it was adorable but I'd never heard that accent before? So I learned I could do accents and I could perform.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I saw all these real strong, funny women, and I loved them. And I also loved the Golden Girls, which again, do we see women in their 70s in a variety of sexual relationships living in a matriarchy? Where's that sitcom now? It doesn't exist. So my sisters and I, I would just either dress them up, force one of them to be Martin Lawrence and the other one would be his girlfriend, Gina. And I would just do plays and things, or we'd take different bedrooms in the house, and those would be the golden girls, but we had babies for some reason. We were like elderly women who each had a different baby. We'd go to each other's house. We had all kinds of imaginary friends and all that type of stuff.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made my sisters laugh a lot and I would entertain them, you know, before the days of iPads. We pretended we were the golden girls sometimes. We watched a lot of, it's interesting from A television perspective now. In the 90s, there were so many black families on television. All these sitcoms in the 90s like Martin in Living Color and different worlds and living single and fresh prints. Yes, well, yes. That was a great show during that time.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so both my parents were really funny, and I certainly understood that if you wanted attention when all the family came round, that you had to be an engaging child. It wasn't the way culture is now where kids are kids and we get down on the floor and do what the children want to do. It was the adults were smoking and drinking and chatting at the kitchen table, and if you wanted any attention you'd sit and you'd have to hold your own and participate in their conversation and get attention by being funny. And I could also get out of trouble. I knew that if I made my mother laugh, then I would never get in trouble for any type of bullying that I subjected my sisters to. Yeah, you could be I knew that comedy was a force. I knew that comedy was valued and having a sense of humor was a cool thing in my house, not at school”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She is. So now my mom quite tragically really, never got to do what she wanted to do, and that was my fault for being born. But now she participates in independent films and does commercials now and then and she still is very involved in local musical theater and of course is a patron of the arts, goes to see many, many plays, does voiceovers and things. But my mom is a frustrated performer and it's such a shame that a lot of the women in my family really were beholden to these cultural norms and weren't allowed to truly find their voices.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do a job she didn't love all her life raise these three girls with a husband who really didn't want to be married to someone like my mum. My mum was a little bit disruptive even for him my dad now has a partner who's perfectly suited to him and they golf and you know she's a more conservative person than my mother was.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, my dad's from Cork. I think he grew up without shoes, but my mom thought he was sophisticated because she'd never met another man from a different country before, as far as I know. It's like, ooh. Exotic. He's from Japan. Nope, Ireland. And my dad was tall and played rugby and really handsome and really funny and charming. And so my mom was just this lovely, beautiful, blonde, tiny woman. And my mom, I think, struggled a lot. I would watch my mom. She definitely had body dysmorphia, still does. She was told growing up that women were dumb broads and she had to be thin and be quiet. And so I watched her really”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While having a dad that was from a different country was not very common, although he did have sort of an Irish community around him. So I don't know what was happening with all these Irishmen that they decided to move to such a strange small town.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's about consent and ownership. And I was always a little bit disruptive that way. And they said, stand still, Catherine, choose a nice poem, Catherine.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I would do mine very feminist, very advocate my first one that, and I would win every single time. It was my thing. I'm like, yes, it's speech season, but they would tell me to stand still because I would try to walk around the stage and be physical and say, uh, Aunt Katrine, you had to stay still. And the first one I did, and it's on YouTube, actually. It was 10 years old. It's called Le Bis, and it was, which means kisses, Le Bez de Bazet encore de Beset Grobe La Voisin Dacote Embez Plain Raleve de la Guardian Marieve is about all these different people kissing you when you're a kid and how your parents would tell you kiss that person give your uncle a kiss give the neighbor a kiss don't hurt someone's feelings by refusing a kiss and at the end it was like I don't have to kiss anybody that I want to Selmon J or something like that and I wouldn't even think at the time how truly disruptive and you know strong of a poem that”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we do. Oh, see, this is what your brain just starts to atrophy. So, you could older. I forget what it was called, but we would do speech competitions. Yes, public speaking contests.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always valued comedy as a child, and I didn't know that I would be a performer, or certainly not that I would be a stand up comedian, but we did musical theater and dance and singing and piano and gymnastics, and we were quite overscheduled because there's not much else to do in a small town if you don't have lessons. But then because my parents sent me to French school, and I mean all French, zero English, all French, my parents didn't speak French, they were just sadists. We went to the school and they have speech competitions in French school systems for some reason. You say, I don't know, what do we call it?”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly when I was growing up being funny didn't make me cool anywhere outside my house. People would tell me then you can't dress up, you don't want to look distracting, you have to wear a hoodie and jeans. Women we were told to be invisible. If you want to do this man's job, try to make it not so obvious that you are a lady.”
2023-09-05 · Intelligence Squared · Katherine Ryan: How I Found My Voice · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT