Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery 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 selector 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 entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they exist in this area between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with 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 spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar 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 her former partner, 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 raised 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, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? 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 caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 disliked it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

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 diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence 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 shot through with bias – 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