A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful 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 norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid 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 little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they exist in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to confide in 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance 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 comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny