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 needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling 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 alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between pride and regret. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively local performance theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up 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 raised until then as a solo mom. “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, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape 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 Hooters years, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand 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 distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come 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 jokes’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, 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 most negative outcome. My reasoning 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief 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 permeated with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny