A Look at Katherine Ryan's Take on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie 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 routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between confidence and shame. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an technical 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 type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 single mother. “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, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She got away 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 controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny