Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability 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 famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. 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 link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain 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 grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 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? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking 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 come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 darkest possibility. My rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole industry 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