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

‘Especially in this place, I feel you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer 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 afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell 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 connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 shocked that her fellatio sequence caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 most negative outcome. My logic 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – 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