A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful 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 performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus 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 received treatments; 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving 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 lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely 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 wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny