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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, choices and missteps, they live in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial 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 pleased to live close to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard 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 darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a notable 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