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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along 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 party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, 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 meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and errors, they exist in this realm between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She did escape 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 discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission 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 linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided 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 rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup 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 quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny