Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant 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 lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how women's liberation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; 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 view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant 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 revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety 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 distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, 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 couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup 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 faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny