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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is confident enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: 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 received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment 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 surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a while people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and regret. It happened, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. 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 misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; 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 boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Betrayal (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 surprised that her story generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” 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 created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny