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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls 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 stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 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 criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid 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 kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. 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 link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? 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 definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult 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 worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to 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 break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was permeated with discrimination – 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