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‘Especially in this nation, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian humorist who has lived in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The first thing you see is the awesome capability of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her material, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really unappealing’

The drumbeat to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is viewed, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means looking great but without ever thinking about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and allied 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 maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My experiences, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this space between pride and shame. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to share with me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live close to their parents and live there for a long time and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause 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 be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in arguments about sex, permission 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 equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I hated it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have 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 issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole circuit 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 created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny