Katherine Ryan on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind 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 another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “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 mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell 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 extended 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 high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” 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 established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny