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

‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, 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 flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat 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 facial structure 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with her former partner, who she saw 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? 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 shocked that her anecdote generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity 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 knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a notable 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