Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The initial impression you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they exist in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, 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 cared for 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 are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point 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 undressed; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – she won a notable 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