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‘Especially in this country, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive 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 significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis 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 youth, 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected 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 an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

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 another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware 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 informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny