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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a picker 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 deferential to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how feminism is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat 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 provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they exist in this space between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering 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 type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and remain there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again an old flame, 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

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

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 a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, 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 worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. 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 take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance 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 industry was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny