Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands 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 said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they live in this space between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

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 establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 surprised that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard 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 most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up 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 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 comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry 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