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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The primary observation you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they exist in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a vibrant local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close 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 grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, met again her former partner, 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 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, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it seems.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in retail, 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 ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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