Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this place, I believe you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” The comedian, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage 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 wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, 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 feeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in retail, was told she had an autoimmune condition, 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 worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny