Tim Hughes can't stop laughing at a comedian who is not afraid to put a few noses out of joint

With the fashion-loving glitterati gathering at Oxford’s Sheldonian theatre for this season’s Oxford Fashion Week show on Saturday, it seems appropriate that the city should play host to one of our most style-conscious comedians...

Katherine Ryan admits she adores couture, and helps launch a weekend of stylish fun by returning to the city’s home of comedy – Glee Club.

“I love fashion and I always wear a dress at a show,” she says. “Fashion is an art and I like to support British designers.

And, she says, looking good on stage is her way of keeping her side of the live experience bargain.

“I’ve learned from my two previous tours that people will invest in a night out,” she says.

“It’s important to them and it’s important to me, so I’ll dress up.

“The comedians who are recognisable to people are cartoon versions of themselves and I think the public want to see the version of me that they see on the panel shows.

“There’s no way that you’d see Jimmy Carr in a tracksuit or you’d think that something was seriously up.”

The Glee Club, in Hythe Bridge Street, is a ludicrously intimate venue for a woman who is all over TV – a regular on panel shows who has also appeared on Channel 4’s Campus, the BBC’s Episodes, Hair and Badults and performs her own material on programmes like Live at the Apollo.

Her new tour, which follows an appearance at west Oxfordshire’s Cornbury Music Festival, in July, is titled Kathbum, and the London-based Canadian insists she won’t be pulling any punches.

“This show is pretty honest,” she says.

“I might take some liberties, but comedians do the opposite from politicians. Politicians will tell little truths that, if you see them written down in a newspaper, seem to be true, but the bigger picture is an entire lie. Comedians will tell tiny lies while the big picture is hopefully more truthful.

“I’ll change bits of stories and names so that a story about my dad is actually about my uncle and a story about that boyfriend is actually about this boyfriend.”

A hit at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, Kathbum features ruminations on our celebrity culture obsession (a topic she also explored in her last touring show, Glam Role Model), and more personal material about the recent wedding of her younger sister back in their hometown of Sarnia.

Katherine’s sister married a Filipino whose family were unimpressed by a satirical remark made by the comedian on Mock The Week a couple of years ago, joking cosmetics companies no longer experimented on animals – but on Filipino children.

“I’m a good person, that’s the thing; I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she says. “I never want to hurt anybody.

“So, if you’re a fan of the kind of comedy that satirises, you can see what I’m poking fun at.

“There’s no way that I’d be making cheap jokes about Filipino children but they just hear the words and that can be really frustrating. I made a speech at the wedding and I did mention that incident so it got a little tense in places, but everyone was fine.

“What I wasn’t expecting was that people had bits in their speech at my expense, but it was all really fun and the last thing I wanted was for my sister’s wedding to be ruined.”

Unlike other comedians (they know who they are), who are content to perform the same material throughout the course of a tour – and even across different tours – as well as on TV, Katherine tries to keep things topical.

“It’s tough to do an identical set on and off for a whole year and an audience can tell when you’re just delivering lines, so I try to mix things up,” she says.

As part of Ryan’s celebrity section, she’ll be discussing such figures as Taylor Swift, Cheryl Fernandez-Versini, Peter Andre and the late Joan Rivers.

“A lot of my celebrity material is looking at the meta narrative and at what’s happening behind the scenes,” she says.

“With many reality TV stars, their weight is 100 per cent engineered. They start to get a bit fat because they’re on TV shows where they’re paid to get drunk and fight, then the managers arrange for photos to be taken of their star on the beach wearing a pink bikini and eating a McDonald’s.

“And then their trainer helps them lose weight so they can flog the book and DVD and fashion line.

“It’s happened so many times with the girls on Geordie Shore and Big Brother. That’s what entertains me: you can put on this puppet show and people don’t seem to notice.”

While enjoying the touring, Katherine is also looking forward to having a break, spending more quality time with her six-year-old daughter Violet, and getting more writing done as she aims to get two sitcoms off the ground. She says: “One I’ve written is about Hooters and another one is about golf and being a single mum.”

She has experience of all the above.

“Also, my face is beginning to annoy people, so I’m happy to work from home for a while and do some writing. I’d love to get a comedy series off the ground but I’d need to not be on tour to do that.”

SEE IT
Katherine Ryan brings her show to The Glee Club, Oxford, on Friday. Tickets are £17.
Call 08714 720400