Canada’s Katherine Ryan released her latest standup comedy special, Glitter Room, on Canada Day on Netflix and it explores at great length her life as a thoroughly single, proudly unattached mother — as regards dating she has, she explains, taken herself out of the game:
“If I were this bad at anything else — if I were a surgeon who managed to kill every patient and burn down the palliative care unit, I’m pretty sure my friends and family would not be like, ‘Katherine, when you gonna get back in the emergency room, girl?’”
More jokes about embracing a man-free life ensued, the crowd at the taping laughed, the special got edited and released, and then news broke this week that threatens her carefully built brand: there seems to be a man in her life.
“I reconnected with my first love from Sarnia from when we were 16,” the U.K.-based Ryan confirmed to the Star on Wednesday. “I turned 36 the other day, so that’s 20 years since we dated and (it happened) on a professional trip — actually, I was in pc28filming Who Do You Think You Are? (a BBC series tracking famous people’s roots). And right after I had filmed Glitter Room all about independence and not needing to be in a traditional shape of a family, I just bumped into him. So it really is when you’re not looking.”
The gentleman in question, Bobby Kootstra by name, is still based here in Canada, where Ryan once suggested she’d return only “,” so her fans need not speculate about their china pattern just yet. She has career tasks in front of her, capitalizing on what she says is a very positive social-media response to the new special.
She may be on a roll in America — a place she suggested earlier this year she might only have one good crack at — and what she credits is not necessarily the years of standup in Britain that made her famous there, but her presence on The Fix, a U.K.-style panel show that arrived on Netflix earlier this year with her regular collaborator Jimmy Carr.
“I have so much faith in Jimmy Carr (and) I know that a lot of people in America and Canada and other countries have more access than ever before to British comedy … I had a good sense when I was filming in Los Angeles, you just have a feeling when it’s good (so) it’s no surprise to me, really, that Americans found it.”
Before The Fix got released, though, she taped Glitter Room — not in the Britain where her fame could guarantee her a warm welcome, but in Los Angeles (with veteran sitcom director Linda Mendoza), entertainment capital of a country where she’s still mostly unknown. She credits Netflix with filling a thousand-seat theatre with general fans of comedy — “I don’t think it’s like The Price Is Right audience at all” — but it wasn’t necessarily her audience.
Jokes about her love of Keeping Up With the Kardashians — “a matriarchy of shape-shifting sisters who destroy men or turn them to women, it’s very much a sci-fi program” — no doubt served the tart-tongued Canadian well with the Californians, as did a long bit about Hamilton (the musical, not the city). However, if it were just about pandering to Americans, the gags about her somehow-posh English daughter and even Chris Hadfield wouldn’t have been there.
The next we North Americans see of Ryan might be the Netflix sitcom she’s creating, The Duchess.
“It is definitely a challenge. Because I’ve never been a screenwriter before … I’m able to create this character that’s a real heightened version of myself,” she said, likening it to Danny McBride’s Eastbound & Down. “This woman is a little bit Kenny Powers; it’s not a sadcom. It’s a really funny, fast-paced sitcom about a disruptive mother. She’s a terrible person, but she’s a good mother.
“I find that it’s not that different to writing standup,” she added. “You need a narrative and there are a lot of rules that you have to follow. But Netflix are great because they let you break a lot of the rules.”
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