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‘Especially in this place, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The first thing you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while articulating coherent ideas in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you performed in a glamorous outfit 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 describes breezily: “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 party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the facial structure of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are treatments 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 feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people secrets; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. 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 connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or urban and had a vibrant local performance arts scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' 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 went back 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 brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it seems.”

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

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? Prostitution? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was instantly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had jokes’

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 unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, 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 didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole circuit was riddled with discrimination – she won a major 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