A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this nation, I think you craved me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, 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 cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable 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 thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they live in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical 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 kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “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 routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny