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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The primary observation you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, 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 nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they reside in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a lively amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay 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 was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; 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 blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates 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 statements to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, 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 told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic 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 was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny