Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job 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 afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications 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 in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known 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, caught up with an old flame, 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated 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 immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was told she had 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 sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny