Netflix’s new comedy special, “Glitter Room” with Katherine Ryan, is all you need for a dose of hilarity. Ryan gives her honest take on everything from “what’s left of America” to price points for her child’s school bake sale, and she delivers all of her comedy in a relatable, fed-up-with-the-world, just-trying-to-live-her-life manner that rings true with everyone. The audience never stops laughing.
One of Ryan’s more hilarious topics in “Glitter Room” is her continuous rant about dating. She shares her exasperation with her friends’ and family’s constant questions about when she’s going to start dating again; apparently, she does not have a good track record. She pulled herself out of the dating game for a reason, which no one in her life seems to understand.
Ryan is honestly confused why everyone wants her to “get back in the game,” so she compares the situation to being a surgeon who manages to kill every patient. Nobody would be asking her to get back to the hospital then, would they? And with Ryan’s excellent sense of humor and hilarious imitations, she makes the whole crowd break into laughter.
In a similar vein, Ryan wonders why some people just can’t seem to accept a household that isn’t “cookie-cutter”; that is, a mom, a dad and several kids. She expresses her frustration with Jane, one of the mothers she has to deal with at her daughter’s school. Jane just cannot comprehend that Ryan is content as a single co-parent.
On stage, Ryan claps back to whatever Jane has said to her in the past. For example, Jane has shared that she would be so sad if she were alone, and Ryan retorts, “I’d be sad if I was alone with you too, Jane.”
Ryan also shares her rather unorthodox, but seemingly effective, method of dealing with bullying. She says that she was the only one who actually believed that the bullies were really just jealous of their targets, and she took that message to heart; when bullies used to throw paper at her head in the fourth grade, Ryan would just sign it, and ask who she should make the autograph out to.
Ryan then pivots her attention to her daughter’s outlook on life, bullying and her parents’ relationship. Now, Ryan says that she always has to be careful not to say a bad word about her daughter’s father, no matter what she might actually think of him, so when her daughter asks questions about what Ryan thinks of him, she doesn’t say he has a gambling problem; instead, he has a “wealth management strategy.”
Ryan shares how she and her daughter’s father, in order to successfully co-parent, have managed to make their daughter think that both of her parents are desperately in love with each other, but they both think that the other is too good for them. But even at 9 years old, Ryan’s daughter is skeptical that her mother thinks her father is too good for her. She imitates in her daughter’s British accent, “But, Mummy, you’re on television. He hasn’t even got a microwave. Are you sure?”
Ryan shares her dislike of her hometown: Sarnia, in Canada. After she names it, an audience member whoops in the background, and Ryan just goes, “No.” Ryan’s aversion to her home is evidently so famous that the town council actually wrote her a letter, asking her to stop saying she was from Sarnia. Obviously, she got her tendency not to pull any punches from her hometown.
She tells a story about her ex, who suddenly moved to Japan while they were dating. He called her about a week after he moved to express his disappointment that she didn’t actually sell all her dogs, pull her daughter out of school and quit her job just to follow him to Japan. He concluded that she must not really need him and that, because she has a daughter, he would never be her first priority, only her second. Ryan scoffs incredulously at that: “Second? Oh … No.”
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Ryan also touches on the double standard for single parents. In her experience, while single mothers are always asked why they aren’t in a relationship yet, single fathers are just seen as eligible. She talks about viral videos she’s seen, with titles like, “Incredible dad learns to braid his own child’s hair! How does he do it?”
“Glitter Room” wraps up with a hilarious bit about Anna Kendrick. Ryan talks about buying her house in London and going through it with a contractor. She doesn’t let him call an area “the piano nook”; no, she makes him call it by its real name: “The Anna Kendrick Memorial Music Hall.”
This leads Ryan to her closing rant, which is about her daughter’s love of Anna Kendrick. Apparently, Kendrick was in London and Ryan’s daughter really wanted to meet her; they went on an adventure, trying to catch a glimpse of the star at her hotel. They couldn’t find her, so Ryan tries to teach her daughter a lesson about how you can’t always get what you want. But, just then, Kendrick herself came up to them and said to Ryan’s daughter, “You must be Violet.” Ryan then burst into tears, in a very relatable case of awkwardness around celebrities.
“Glitter Room” is the epitome of relatable comedy because Ryan deals with situations in an honest, real, hilarious way and isn’t afraid to tell the audience what she really thinks. She uses different tones of voice and imitates accents brilliantly, too, and her stand-up draws the audience in and keeps their attention. Anyone who enjoys comedy should definitely check out “Glitter Room,” as well as Ryan’s other Netflix comedy special, “In Trouble,” which aired in 2017. Both specials have her blend of hilarity and bluntness, which makes for a great time.
