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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage 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 comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved 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 slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with 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 grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be fired 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 sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had material.” The whole industry was shot through 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