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

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, 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 addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' 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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 raised 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, stylish, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware 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 material.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny