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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you appeared in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive 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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, actions and mistakes, they live in this area between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to share with me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a considerable period 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 didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in business, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill 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 extended life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny