Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear 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 flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector 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 entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never 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 in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. 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 remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave 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 enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny