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

‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, 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 didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary 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 underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: 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 slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering 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 content to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

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 an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 hated it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a prestigious 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