Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off 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 parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage 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 child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, 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 feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how feminism is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “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, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – 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