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

‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 slag 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 wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, 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 addresses the heart of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 reasoning 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a major 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