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

‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 long time and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she dated 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick 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 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 couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter 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 make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole industry 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