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‘Especially in this country, I feel you needed me. You didn’t realise it but you needed 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 close to 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam parental devotion while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you observe 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 exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement 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 picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the facial structure of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to slim down, 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, choices and mistakes, they reside in this realm between confidence and regret. It happened, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing confessions; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly prosperous or urban and had a active community theater musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a considerable period and have each other’s children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood 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 went out with as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had cared for 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, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have relocated 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 disliked it, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose 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 ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt 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 plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny