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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her material, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the core of how women's liberation is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing 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 supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and missteps, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and remain there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She went back 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it seems.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

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 an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (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 shocked that her anecdote generated outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 poor.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, 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 told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. 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 care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in 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 confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny