Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, 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 entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. 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 stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? 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 anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, 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 sick 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 haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. 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 time off, she would care for 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 faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny