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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to lift some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the male gaze; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure 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 life events, choices and errors, they reside in this realm between satisfaction and embarrassment. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know mistakes 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 notably prosperous or metropolitan and had a vibrant community theater musicals 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 sort of community where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she went out with 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 an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, urban, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell 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 split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole circuit was riddled with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny