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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress 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 liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a considerable period 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 didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘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 period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions 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 references the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt 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 plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – 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