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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 embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while 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 reside in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people secrets; 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 thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts 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 dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “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, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story caused outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people 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 vermin there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 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 was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, 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 being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a major 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