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

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement 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 mock them; you don’t have to be nice 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 focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant 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 slim down, 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 touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, 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, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup 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 faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny