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‘Especially in this country, I think you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. 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 comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra 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 baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing 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 keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with Bobby Kootstra, who she saw 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 a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew 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 plainly, “I was confident I had material.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny