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‘Especially in this place, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra 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 material, which she explains casually: “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 promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed 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 real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they reside in this area between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, 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 misconception: “You would be fired for being undressed; 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 crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote caused anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments 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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed 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 transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated 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