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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you required me, to remove some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she describes simply: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a significant other and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to 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 sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a vibrant amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 single mother. “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, stylish, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 anecdote generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 hated it, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill 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 long life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period 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 enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through 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