Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required 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 flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

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 facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “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, mobile. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 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 couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing 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 plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through 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