“Katherine Ryan has spoken out once again about sexual misconduct in the comedy industry as she claimed one male comedian showed other cast mates intimate videos of himself.”, — write: www.dailymail.co.uk
The Canadian comedian, 41, explained that the incident happened while backstage in the green room of a big show.
Speaking on the latest episode of the Nip Tuck podcast with hosts Ashley Stobart and Lauren Adamson the three women discussed the Me Too movement as Katherine opened up about being a woman in the industry.
While Katherine didn’t identify the comedian, she did state that he isn’t British.
She explained: ‘I’ve been in green rooms where very famous male comedians. One male comedian in particular... I will say it’s not British.
‘He was very famous, very rich, very powerful, and he was in a room on a big show. I was one of a few women on that bill, maybe three women.
‘And there was a young female comedian who was starting out who was next to him, and he was with all the lads, showing pictures and videos on his phone that he had taken of himself having sex with women.
‘So, like, really intimate photos, intimate videos and he was showing them. His penis was in a lot of these videos.’
Revealing how the comedian came to Katherine for support she continued: ‘She felt very uncomfortable about that and then she came into my dressing room to be like, “Oh, I didn’t like him showing me that” and she’s about to go on stage.
‘She’s very new. I was even quite new at that time, but yeah, stuff like that and being a minority in that situation, which female comedians, especially when I was starting out, were always minorities.’
She added: ‘In every green room, every dressing room, there are things we can’t do that the boys can do.
‘We can’t take a night bus. We can’t sleep on the floor with like, four other comedians starting out a lot of times. We have children that we have to look after, and then we get fans who, like, could kill us.’
Speaking about American comedian Nikki Glaser, she continued: ‘Nikki Glaser, who is doing amazing in America and hosting the Golden Globes for the second year in a row, she would make a joke of it on Instagram.
‘She’d write “come kill me in Cincinnati at 7pm, come kill me in San Diego at 8pm.” We have to publish where we are at night and we’re always alone, it’s a bit different.’
She added: ‘We don’t want to get in trouble and we don’t want to say anything and they’re allowed to continue to work.’
In January Katherine opened up about her ‘scary’ experiences with men in the early days of her television career.
Speaking to Good Housekeeping UK she recalled some encounters with male fans who tried to follow her home after gigs.
She said: ‘When I started doing television, male audience members could be weird with me.
‘I had this following of very strange lone-wolf men… Before I had a tour manager, they’d follow me on to the train and keep talking to me.
‘I was trying to be polite and create a boundary, but some of those interactions were scary.’
She also discussed calling out sexual predators in the world of comedy but said that she has been lucky with most of the shows she has worked on.
Katherine said: ‘No one has tried anything weird with me because I’m probably very scary.
‘I’m aware that by saying that I could be seen to be victim blaming, so I want to make it clear that I’m not saying someone else has received poor treatment because they’ve got ‘the wrong energy’.
‘I’ve been lucky, in part, I think, because of the guys I came up with – Joe Lycett, Rob Beckett and Romesh Ranganathan are just really, really good guys.’
Fellow comedian Lucy Beaumont has also spoken out male predators in the industry as she confirmed in a 2023 interview that she had been targeted herself.
She said she had suffered ‘quite a few incidences’ early on as she set out in the industry.
And confirming the ‘blacklist’ of alleged offenders, she said there were up to 15 men carrying out the appalling behaviour.
Lucy said when being asked if anything had held her back: ‘Predatory male behaviour. I’ve had quite a few incidences where if you’re in any other workforce you would go to HR, but there isn’t one. I think it’s just everywhere and it’s not talked about enough.
‘It upsets me when I hear about young female comics having the same experiences. I thought for a while it was the same five or six people – and now it’s not – I could name you 10 or 15 because of course people talk.’
She added during the interview on The Comedian’s Comedian Podcast : ‘Comedy has the biggest gossips ever so everybody knows – or if you don’t know the ones I know yet then you will do soon.
‘It attracts such interesting, passionate, raw, edgy, wounded people – but it also attracts predatory men who are really messed up and sexually have been repressed for years. And they get a bit of fame and display these behaviours.
‘It just gets covered up. Their agents know and the channels know and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. There’s been times when I’ve just wanted to go on Twitter and just let people know everyone that we talk about, but not allowed to say.’
Katherine also previously hit out at panel shows for being ‘sexist’, claiming that women over the age of 35 face ‘potential irrelevance’ by decision-makers.
The comedian, who makes regular appearances on 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown, alleged that female contributors are frequently rejected for ‘being too old’ which is a treatment their male counterparts do not receive.
Chatting to the Daily Star in 2022, she said: ‘Potential irrelevance is another obstacle women face at 35. This is especially true in the entertainment industry.
‘I’ve actually overheard decision-makers rejecting suggestions for female contributors on the basis that they’d be “too old for our audience”, then booking male comedians in the same age bracket instead.
‘You only need to look at the lingering panel show trend of casting six male headliner comedians next to one or two “beautiful entertainer” category women who’ve never delivered a single line of stand-up in their young lives to see that female comics aren’t valued in the same way as our male counterparts.
The Canada native went on to reveal how producers had told her to ‘smile more’ through an ear piece, ‘specifically at the very serious man sat next to her’.
She continued: ‘I’ve had frank production chats about wearing my hair down to look “softer”.
‘I’ve had my wardrobe scrutinised while half the boys can’t even bring in a clean shirt and I’d be a fool to think that my carefully crafted glamorous image hasn’t been at least partly responsible for my success.
‘Oh, I’ve also shared a table at an awards show with a big-time producer who got drunk and made loud MOO-ing noises at a young woman while she accepted her trophy on stage.
The star continued: ‘If we complain about any of it, we’re branded forever as difficult.’
She also attacked the gender tokenism on the BBC’s satirical panel show Mock the Week and explained she boycotted it because she felt her appearances were used to deflect criticism from the show’s lack of diversity.
The panel show – hosted by Dara O’Briain – sees two teams of three compete to make the best jokes about current affairs, and has run for 18 seasons on BBC Two.
However, it has come under criticism for alienating female guests and viewers for its ‘laddish’ humour and competitive atmosphere. Such accusations led to the BBC banning all-male panel shows in 2014.
Speaking on her podcast Katherine said she had chosen not to appear on Mock the Week in protest against ‘pedestal feminism’, or the act of lifting up one woman while denying others opportunities.
‘I love Mock the Week ,’ she said on her podcast. ‘I love Dara, I think that that show has given a platform for so many British comedians.
‘But I had to stop doing it because I knew that every time I was booked on that show I was taking food out of the mouth of another woman.
‘I was never taking James Acaster’s spot, I was never taking Ed Gamble’s spot on that show, I was always 100% of the time taking a job away from one of my female peers.
‘I thought, “OK, I’ve had my time on this show, and now I have to give it to someone else.”
‘As much as I loved to do it – it really helped me open up a fresh audience, I loved to go on there and play with all the other comics.
‘But I couldn’t do it anymore because of that fact alone – “No, Mock the Week doesn’t have a problem with women, look, Katherine Ryan’s on the show.”
‘Nuh uh. And now look, they will let two of us on in the same week!’
She also criticised the show for not offering her the same coverage as her male counterparts, saying: ‘I wasn’t allowed to do the stand-up round, apart from once. And they always made me sit in the same chair.
‘Do you remember, we’d always be on the right, in the middle, in case what? One of us menstruated? It had some like, leak protection?’
Prior to her career in comedy, Katherine worked as a waitress at Hooters as one of their famous ‘Hooter Girls’.
A string of controversies, including sexual harassment claims, discrimination cases, and a proposed introduction of even skimpier uniforms, has tarnished the brand’s reputation over the years as it has struggled to move with the times.
However Katherine herself has insisted she doesn’t have bad memories working there as she said on Paul C. Brunson’s podcast We Need to Talk that: ‘Hooters was interestingly the place that I found kind of the most empowerment for myself.’
The comedian said customers valued her ‘uniqueness’ and tipped for her likeable personality.
She explained: ‘There would be conversations about staying thin and our bodies and how athletic we looked. We would hula hoop if we had free time, there’s a bikini pageant at the end of every year.
‘It objectifies women yes, but I think it’s women who can find empowerment in any situation, even one that objectifies us. At that time I wanted to be objectified.
‘Because even as a young feminist I didn’t know exactly what it meant. I knew I wanted to be successful and I wanted to make choices and have autonomy and power and to have the opportunities that boys had.
‘But I also wanted to be liked and to be liked I felt I had to be pretty and uncomplicated. And Hooters was interestingly the place where I found the most empowerment for myself but it was through trial an error.’
She admitted: ‘I would get in trouble for the things that I said, I got tired of competing in the bikini pageants so I asked to host them to be able to wear a dress and have a voice.
‘I found like-minded women there outside of my small town who liked my uniqueness. Accidentally I found all those things there, perhaps I could have found them in an office.’
Katherine added: ‘And I learned that through my personality I earned more than the girls who were pretty.
‘I was capable of taking more tables. I would get more tips because my personality became valued. I gave good service, I was funny, there were guys who would laugh, I felt like that was a really respectful feeling.
‘That felt so much better than someone leering at me, who wants to be leered at, that gets old real fast.’