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

‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 imperfect as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they reside in this space between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she saw 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – 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 weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments 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 mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, 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 industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny