A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, 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, actions and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life 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 started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (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 anecdote provoked controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy 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 fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – 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