Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned 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 sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed 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 discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to 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, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was permeated 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny