A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood 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 went out with 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 solo mom. “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, chic, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 poor.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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