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

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist 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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis 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 young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; 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 especially wealthy or urban and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She went 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done 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 cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny