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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” Katherine Ryan, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along her recently born fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The initial impression you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of affectation and contradiction. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or beautiful was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 liked.”

Then there was her material, which she explains breezily: “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 mother, as a spouse 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 all the time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My personal stories, choices and mistakes, they reside in this space between pride and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have each other’s children. When I go back now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again 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 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 started, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the Hooters years, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and abuse, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 worst-case scenario. 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny