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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for close to 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 fully beam maternal love while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant 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 slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry 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 brought up until then as a lone parent. “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, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a venue (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her anecdote caused outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ 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 vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was found to have a chronic illness, 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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic 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 change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny