A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny