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

‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, 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 gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell 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 connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 stay there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (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 mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she liked 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 outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates 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 linking of certain statements 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard 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 most negative outcome. 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny