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

‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

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 jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments 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 feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 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, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. 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 myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob 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 certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 sick 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 separated 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 high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny