Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate 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, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical 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 sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain 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 first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 solo mom. “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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (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 routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking 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 come 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny