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

‘Especially in this place, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat 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 facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments 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 core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant 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 high achiever. She longed to get out 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 considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; 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 violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp 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. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny