Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled 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 raised until then as a single mother. “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, chic, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny