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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up 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 catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a elegant attire with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job 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 chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the heart of how feminism is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they reside in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, who she went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “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 sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret 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. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘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 reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy 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 white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through 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