Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they live in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close 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 returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired 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 breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, 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 dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt 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 knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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