Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire 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 material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she went out with 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing 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 plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a major 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