Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this place, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” 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 humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises simply: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable 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 maintained 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 missteps, they reside in this area between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad owned an technical 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 sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape 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 debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? 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 story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with discrimination – she won a prestigious 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