A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born 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 articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. 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 liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear 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 human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time 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 she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was permeated with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny