When the pandemic hit, Ryan Ken’s anxiety went through the roof. They scrubbed everything down. Their hands were pruney and ashy; their apartment had an ever-constant aroma of bleach. But what eased their nerves was the support they received from his family and friends. As an offering to this community, the 29-year-old began posting short sketches online, which in turn helped them work through their anxieties and insecurities — and those videos went viral. You might be familiar with a few. There’s one where Ken plays an actor auditioning for the role of Gay Best Friend in a 90s sitcom. There’s “Black person maintaining a ‘professional demeanor’ after another incident of racist bullshit,” which makes its rounds online every time some racist bullshit goes down. A bit about how Malcolm & Marie’s neighbors might have responded to the couple fighting all night is Ken’s most recent hit.
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Ken, who works in diversity and inclusion training, is a classically trained violinist from South Carolina who currently lives in Michigan. GQ spoke to them about their viral videos; Let Me Back Up, a podcast they host with thier college friend, Jennie Crichlow; how naps can be a radical act; and what it feels like to get attention from Beyoncé’s mom.
I love your podcast. It reminds me of Still Processing.
Thank you, I really appreciate that. That is one of the projects that I’m most proud of. I love some of the kind of healing that happens for me personally and even for the people in my immediate orbit. And it all just came from a conversation with [Jennie]. That episode on Black excellence encouraged my mom to go to therapy. She said she listened to that episode and reflected on her relationship to work and productivity. That to me is one of the things I’m most proud of in my life.
So, Malcolm & Marie — I take it you did not like the movie.
I... [laughs] I... have complicated feelings about the movie. There are many elements of it that I do enjoy. I think Zendaya is an incredible actress. I think that some of the cinematography is gorgeous, and I also understand movies to be collaborative projects that lots of people work on other than the people you just see on screen. My feelings about the movie are more complicated than liking it and not liking it. And I think one of the reasons why I enjoyed making the video is that it’s kind of a creative way to articulate some of what I saw as the limitations of the movie or the things that worked or didn’t work, but do it in a way that’s playful. The other thing too, particularly with social media — and let me be clear, I’m not one of these people who thinks social media these days is so bad because it’s been great to me — but, there can be a tendency where there’s a stan culture where everything is wonderful and great, and there’s nothing to criticize, and any other sort of criticism is seen as hating or tearing down.
Yes.
And that’s not what I’m interested in. But, there were questions about what this portrait of a relationship meant and what it looked like. So, what I remember being struck by the whole film was I really just wanted Zendaya’s character, Marie, to have a friend who’s like, “girl, come over, I’mma make some soup, we’ll watch a movie, you don’t have to have that man hollering in your face like that.” A lot of what I was trying to articulate in that video was a desire for her to be cared for more. For a movie that’s about love, it was interesting how — I just wanted there to be some gentleness.
Miss Tina Knowles shared the video on Instagram…
Well, I just ascended to a new level. I should change my name. It really meant a lot in part because this is someone I know of, respect, and admire, but part of what has made me excited about that and the way that it was shared was that it resonated with women and female-identified folks in particular. I was talking to one of my friends about it, and she was saying that what she enjoyed most was that you could tell the love of and respect of women was crucial to it. But, seeing [Knowles] respond to that positively meant a lot, and it was probably one of the highlights of my week. I had friends send me champagne after they saw that.
I’m trying to complicate my idea of celebrity, of course, but the other thing that I tell myself is that Beyoncé saw it and that one day soon, I will get a Beyoncé NDA, and I have always wanted to see a Beyoncé NDA. I imagine that there’s an NDA to see the NDA. When this goes out we can tell Beyoncé, that I will tell no one.
There are some very thoughtful critiques of Beyoncé, namely her participation in capitalism, but do you feel the criticism she receives is too amplified sometimes?
It’s hard to say. I don’t know if I have a flat answer for that because she’s definitely a capitalist, and I don’t even think that’s an offensive or controversial thing to say. There’s this talk around the intensity of her fandom. There’s complicated conversions around that. But, she does seem to be a lightning rod for a lot of our cultural anxieties in the way that a lot of women, especially women of color, Black women, in particular, have been throughout our cultural history. We’re having kind of this reckoning — even with Britney Spears and all these people — around the way we have delighted in mistreating women. But, I think what I’m more interested in than the actual person, Beyoncé, who we can’t know and won’t know, is how so often women become the stand-in for our own cultural anxieties and how common it is for [people to say about] a lot of women in public, “I just don’t like her,” and to not have any interrogation of why that might be, why we say that so readily and so easily about women.
What would your dream project be?
It’s hard to say because all of the acting stuff has been a surprise. It was just stuff that I was doing as I was working a full-time job to kind of nourish myself, but I think one of the things that making the videos and putting them out has done has actually reassured me of the clarity of my own voice. So I’m really interested in writing for myself. What I’ve enjoyed about doing the TikTok stuff or the Twitter stuff is I don’t have to wait to audition. I can cast myself in stuff that nobody would think to cast me in. Nobody’s gonna cast me to play Nancy Grace or Bernie Sanders. I’m enjoying what having the full autonomy of my creativity is and means. I also want to work with other writers and people because I think some of the stories that I want to tell I’ve not yet seen.
One of my favorite sketches of yours is “Black person maintaining a ‘professional demeanor’ after another incident of racist bullshit,” I’ve been through that a few times. In one of the Let Me Back Up episodes, you say that being able to have grace under pressure in situations like that is Black Excellence, which I love, trying to reupholster that term. What inspired that sketch? Was it something specific?
It was a combination of things, but the thing that was sort of most acute was that happened after the Breonna Taylor verdict. So, that day I was working and just… I couldn’t… I just could not. I kept thinking about her family, who was probably worried about her getting COVID because she was an EMT. I kept thinking about the pain of this for her loved ones, for her partner who was there. I couldn’t do the work stuff. It was so on my mind because it was like a non-functional kind of emotionality. I wanted to sort of get it out of my spirit, not totally shake it, but sort of work it out of my body so that I might be able to do the tasks of my day.
The thought of doing the tasks of my day as I was in the middle of grieving this person who I didn’t even know — it just seemed sort of nonsensical to me. So I just did that. It’s barely acting in the conventional sense. I tried to mimic what it’s like to hold it together in just a barrage of bad news. We’re always getting it, but I think there was something about the pandemic in particular that, for some reason, made these stories more acute, maybe because we didn’t have distractions or other stimuli. I just pressed record and improvised a couple of takes and let myself feel how painful that was and did the work of trying to put it together. It’s one of the sketches that I’m most proud of because it seemed like it meant something, especially to Black folks and people were saying, “I really needed this today,” and it’s interesting to see — I always know some shit is going down if that video is getting shared again.
One of the throughlines in all of your videos is this unspoken language specifically to Black people.
I’m writing a lot of sketches from my own experience and how I relate to other people in my life. I also want the videos to be joyful offerings to Black people and to folks of other marginalized identities. I want it to be very clear that my aim is at power and powerful structures and not people who are on the receiving end of that. So much of my experience is having this experience of being the joke. In comedy, there’s this conjuring of queer people’s image. Sometimes the joke is just reminding you that queer people exist and that in itself is laughable. There’s a direct throughline from that to the harm that people face, because if the fact that queer people exist is laughable, what is the logical conclusion about what those people’s lives mean?
Throughout Let Me Back Up, you frequently mention naps and resting. Why is this always on your mind?
So, the Nap Ministry is a social media account that I’ve been following for some time. She in particular is responsible for some of my thought and provocation around rest and part of why I think rest is a racial justice issue. I’ve been reflecting more on how much even familial dynamics were shaped by people who were exploited at work and what it means to be in a work culture where sometimes our relatives and the people closest to us get us at our most tired. These spaces where we spend most of our awake hours can be personally and spiritually draining.
I just also believe when you consider the legacy of Black people — and I’m talking specifically about my experience as a Black American whose family goes back to slavery — that the ability to rest when you want to rest is a new, novel experience. I have to firmly believe that one of the things that my ancestors wanted for themselves and for me was to rest when I was tired. We live in a society that devalues Black people so much and still has a hard time distinguishing them from their labor, from property, and I just feel like [rest] is to acknowledge the humanness of our bodies. We are so much more than just working. It’s serious business to me. It’s a frontier that I’m still doing a lot of learning. Especially as a Black person, I feel like I want to push for a culture that understands rest is our birthright, holy, and is something worthy of being protected.
What’s next for you?
I don’t know [laughs]. All of this is kind of unexpected. I was working a full-time job and these videos were a way to try out some things for acting class and to make my friends laugh. I had prepared to go on a trajectory of being a DEI professional and focusing on that, but there might be some opportunities to manage or navigate both. I’m getting to talk to some cool people that I admire about potential projects or collaborating together, people wanting to hear my ideas. Because I’m a new actor I’m trying to make peace with the fact that I don’t have it all figured out, that I don’t have an agent. I don’t have a team, but following my creativity and my instincts around this work has nourished me and opened doors in ways that I would have never fathomed, and my plan is to continue that.
