Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector 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 lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to 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 pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines 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? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity 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 distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision 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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole scene was shot through 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny