A comedy sensation across the pond for years, Canada’s Katherine Ryan is — with a new Comedy Network series, a new Netflix series and more — finally turning her sights on cracking North America. She’s glad she didn’t get these opportunities much earlier.

“America, I find, gets really excited about someone just once,” says the 35-year-old single mother, on a crackling line from London, adding that “I was a terrible comedian when I started. I loved Sarah Silverman, I loved edgy comedy, but I didn’t understand (it so) I was just saying shocking things … had I been offered a special at that time, I would have been a very different comedian and it wasn’t my voice at all; I was sort of doing impressions of everybody else.”

Silverman’s influence is still vaguely perceptible in Ryan’s work — and a lot of other comedians of her generation — as seen in 2017 standup Netflix special In Trouble, notably in her tart put-downs, sweetly delivered (eg. on the death of Joan Rivers: “that woman got exactly what she wanted out of her final surgery: to stop aging”). But the Sarnia native — more on that later — is carving out a very different niche for herself through an exhausting-looking number of projects: an upcoming standup special, an upcoming Netflix narrative series, a new series just arrived on Netflix (The Fix) and hosting a standup series now airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on Comedy Network: The Stand-Up Show With Katherine Ryan.

It all grows out of a decision in 2008 to leave Toronto — where she studied urban planning — to move with her then-boyfriend to London, which turned out to be fertile soil for her creativity. She had made the odd stab at comedy here, but there, she got serious about it, doing open-mic gigs which led to poorly paying ones in the familiar way and eventually to critical praise and stardom, and she credits the arrival of her daughter Violet: “That’s a catalyst for me … I just didn’t really have the same insecurities that I had before she was born. I realized that the only way that I was ever going to be successful in this career was to communicate in authenticity.”

Now she occupies a very high rank in a distinctly British role for comic performers: she’s a regular guest on panel shows like The Fix (hosted by her regular collaborator Jimmy Carr), which tends to mean a kind of standup sitting down. So on YouTube there is an armload of clips from shows with titles like 8 Out of 10 Cats or Have I Got News For You featuring Ryan’s comic voice, just not in the usual format of a standup, alone onstage, mic in hand.

She’s doing that at last — a little of it, anyhow — hosting The Stand-Up Show, the eight-part Comedy Network series that was filmed at Just for Laughs last year, as she sets up fellow comics including Canadian talents such as Courtney Gilmour and Ivan Decker.

Hosting only offers her material in bite-size doses, but for an expat who can sell out theatres in Britain it’s still her first regular spot on Canadian TV. Until now, her material that’s most familiar to Canadians might be her bit in In Trouble about her hometown, “a terrible, horrible, awful place … We are the teen-cancer, teen-suicide and teen-pregnancy capital of Canada … we nearly lost teen-suicide one year to St. Catharines, but then they had a really nice summer and we won.”

(She says she “hadn’t fully considered” that anyone in Sarnia would ever see it, but residents responded maturely and calmly, and that “was the absolute best reaction they could have had because it made me feel terrible.” Ryan says her Stand-Up Show material contrasts her with the other most famous Sarnian, astronaut Chris Hadfield, but don’t interpret this as her feeling the pull of home, necessarily. She told the Telegraph in 2015, “If I ever move back to Canada, it’ll be because I’m terminally ill.”)

Unencumbered by an intimate relationship — she joked recently that men are like dolphins, “they should be enjoyed on holiday” — she has more projects in the pipeline, including two for Netflix: a scripted series, The Duchess, about a single mom in London not unlike Ryan; and Glitter Room, her next standup special, coming sometime this year.

“I personally like it better than the first one. We shot it in Los Angeles. I just feel like it’s been beautifully shot; I am so proud of it. I love the production team that we got and I’m really excited for people to see it and I don’t even talk about Sarnia in this one.”

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Garnet Fraser is a deputy entertainment editor and a contributor to the Star’s Entertainment section. He is based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @garnetfraser

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