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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating coherent ideas in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a dismissal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your little push-up bra 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved 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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how women's liberation is conceived, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable 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 relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, 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 personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I view it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving 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 remain there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own first love? She went back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised 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, sophisticated, urban, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be let go 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 breached so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 shocked that her story provoked anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in 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 belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a notable 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