A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “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 flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 darkest possibility. 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny