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

‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes simply: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they reside in this area between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back 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 went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny