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

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 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 addresses the core of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with 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 sustained 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 personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. 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 topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned 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? 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 shocked that her story provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny