A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take 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 lift some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven 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 relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned 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 sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's 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 high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she went out with 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into 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 material.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny