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

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the heart of how feminism is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period 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 didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 lone parent. “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, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – 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