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‘Especially in this country, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile 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 consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My life events, actions and errors, they live in this space between confidence and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. 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 remain there for a lifetime and have each other’s children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up 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 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 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, cosmopolitan, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a myth: “You would be let go for being nude; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), 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 red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? 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 story provoked outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in arguments about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who misinterpret the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

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 rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole industry was shot through with discrimination – 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