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

‘Especially in this country, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; 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 keen for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, 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 next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape 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 a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, 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 persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit 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 conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny