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

‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a norm 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 unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the 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 baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, 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 addresses the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged 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 impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they exist in this area between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back 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 first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? 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 expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, consent 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 comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny