Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ 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, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they live in this area between confidence and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. 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 return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 problems, if we haven't separated 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny