Comedy / katherine ryan
Review: Katherine Ryan, The Lantern
Katherine Ryan is known for diatribes against celebrities, and that was certainly what she delivered on stage at The Lantern: Heat magazine dunked in a bucket of vitriol.
Although the choice of targets – Tulisa, Peter Andre, Miley Cyrus (“twerking: not so much a dance as a cry for help”) – does occasionally feel like shooting fish in a barrel, Ryan’s act has a warmth which takes the sting out of many of the digs, whilst also lulling the audience into a false sense of snuggly comfort before delivering a barrage of no-holds-barred punchlines.
The sweet and sour is also perfectly balanced in Ryan’s more personal material: being a single mother, her relationship with her young daughter, and the many defects of her ex-partner. Because ironically, like her tabloid-haunting celebrity targets, Ryan also has a love-rat in her cupboard. She is getting her revenge with a microphone and her self-described “smart mouth”, dragging out and dissecting his many defects in front of a live audience whilst still maintaining his anonymity for legal reasons.
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It’s ironic that this part of the act comes with a lawyer’s caveat, since the rest of her act is lavishly sprinkled with what is undeniably pure potential slander in the true legal sense (and therefore utterly unreproducible here). It seems unlikely that any judge would buy into Ryan’s faux-innocent defence that “you can’t libel the dead, and I assumed many of these people would be dead by the time I performed this show”.
Part of Ryan’s appeal lies in the contrast between the wide-eyed charm and the potty mouth. But ultimately this is not cheap character comedy which relies on the dissonance of a sweet and innocent ingénue delivering material of such acidity and smuttiness. It’s rather simpler than that: Ryan is just a very perceptive and honest comedian who has absolutely no problem telling it like it is. And being very funny in the process.
Katherine Ryan played The Lantern on Wednesday, May 20. For more Lantern and Colston Hall comedy lineups, visit www.colstonhall.org/whats-on/comedy