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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while forming coherent ideas in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her material, which she explains simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: freedom means looking great but not dwelling about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which God forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of late capitalist 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 controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they live in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded 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 sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, who she dated 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 solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

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

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source 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 take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about 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? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence provoked controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something larger: a calculated inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 comedy’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had material.” The whole circuit was permeated with sexism – she won a notable 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