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

‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. 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 stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or cosmopolitan 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 perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave 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 found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being nude; 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of 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 demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny