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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and remaining distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence 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 received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape 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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (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 amazed that her anecdote caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 darkest possibility. My rationale 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 was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny