Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human 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 nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; 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 sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return 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 high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

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, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning 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 extended 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 following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious 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