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

‘Especially in this nation, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project parental devotion while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of artifice and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it seems.”

‘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 time at the restaurant, 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 take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill 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 alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware 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 felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny