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

‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with 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 view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have each other’s 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 teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her anecdote provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have an autoimmune condition, 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking 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 plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry 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 conceived in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny