Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis 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 sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with discrimination – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny