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‘Especially in this country, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you went on stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; 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 touches on the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed 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 went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, behaviors and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; 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 feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater musicals scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a lifetime 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 isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic 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, permission and exploitation, the people who don’t understand 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. “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 romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I felt confident 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, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can change. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter 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 break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny