Exploring Katherine Ryan's Views on Success, Feminism, Bad Reviews and Ballsiness.

‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project maternal love while crafting coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 imperfect as a parent, as a significant other 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 pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return 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 went back to Sarnia, met again 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 lone parent. “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, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission 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 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 partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, 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 ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying 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 plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny