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

‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she describes 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, 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 root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. 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 live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – 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